International SEO

Hello everyone,

International SEO is definitely one of the most complex types of SEO. I have created a plan for one of my valued clients to take their site international, but I do have a couple of concerns I would like to bring up on this forum. If you guys could give me some feedback that would be great.

The client is keen to target specific countries and get maximum leverage. So I recommended that they create a country domain for each target area (ie.us).... This is the best method to use according to most sources. Amazon, and all the big boys apply this method.

However one concern I have is creating these new sites on fresh domains, will it be able to rank competitively? I guess we can use canonical tags to use the blog on this new site, but what effect will this have on a COMPLETELY fresh domain with no links.

Does anyone have experience with this? To begin, we are targeting the US but it will get even more difficult when we start to branch out to France, Germany etc, I imagine it will be a big task with many different approaches.

Any input would be great

Well there are pros and cons in using country-level domains. Pros are = the country level domain will rank fairly easily for that particular country, when a local IP is used to search for a particular keyword on google - your site would be given a tad-bit priority in the ranking.
Cons are = since these are new domains, you will need to start from scratch - no copy pasting is allowed for best effect, and the setup time is very lengthy indeed. And since this is a brand new domain, you will need to build links afresh for the site, which is another big cost/effort involved. But once a certain level of authority is built, you'll find that domain ranking very easily for local SEO.

ProxiesHTTP said:

Well there are pros and cons in using country-level domains. Pros are = the country level domain will rank fairly easily for that particular country, when a local IP is used to search for a particular keyword on google - your site would be given a tad-bit priority in the ranking.
Cons are = since these are new domains, you will need to start from scratch - no copy pasting is allowed for best effect, and the setup time is very lengthy indeed. And since this is a brand new domain, you will need to build links afresh for the site, which is another big cost/effort involved. But once a certain level of authority is built, you'll find that domain ranking very easily for local SEO.

Click to expand...

Will Google pick up that our new site is a subdomain from our old site? And give it some authority?

We will be linking from the main site to the new site.

its also impossible to create all new content, this site has over 500,000 products!

Br4mz said:

Will Google pick up that our new site is a subdomain from our old site? And give it some authority?

We will be linking from the main site to the new site.

its also impossible to create all new content, this site has over 500,000 products!

Click to expand...

Normally google will see this is as just a country specific copy version of the main site. You have to link properly from the main site, such as using a vertical menu with each country in it and linking from there, so all sites are interlinked.

If so the local sites should rank quite fast without sandbox, as google is smart enough to determine this is the same business as the main site, just in another country, so some of the trust is passed. Link from menus and you also link in content to reinforce interlinking.