Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we鈥檙e not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
What's the point of an EU site?
-
Buongiorno from 18 degrees C Wetherby UK
On this site http://www.milwaukeetool.eu/ the client wants to hold on to the EU site despite there being multiple standalone country sittes e.g. http://www.milwaukeetool.fr & http://www.milwaukeetool.co.uk
Why would you ever need an EU site? I mean who ever searches for an EU site? If the client holds on to the eu site despite my position it's a waiste of time from a search perspective is the folowing the best appeasment?
When a user enters the eu url or redirects to country the detected, eg I'm in Paris I enter www.milwaukeetool.eu it redirects to http://www.milwaukeetool.fr. My felling this would be the most pragmatic thing to do?
Any ideas please,
Cioa,
David -
The .eu domain termination is a generic, hence it is not bound to geo-targeting on Google Webmaster Tool. In that sense, it is an alternative to the .com domain termination, if the .com is not available.
It was created by the European Union has a way to "communicate" that the business owning the domain has an European nature and that it is based on a nation of E(uropean) U(nion) and that is primary market is the EU.
From an SEO point of view, it doesn't offer any really advantage with respect any other generic domain name:
-
you can't geo-target more countries with a single domain name
-
you can't geo-target political regions (or continents).
Hence, it is good to have it for defending your brand, and to use it if .com (or .net) have been already taken. But if you have a .com, then it is better to redirect the .eu to it.
-
-
I had that argument with a client once and i manage to persuade them not to go ahead with it as they had .com and .co.uk .
.com is international so i think it did make sense not to use .eu but in your case, if you don't have .com then probably you need to look at which countries you want to target. If your client is UK based and if they target client from all around EU, then it might make sense to use .eu as you have very little chance to target someone in Italy with co.uk or .com.fr domains. If you are targeting only UK and FR then, you don't need .eu. It will just duplicate your work.
-
Hello
I got the same situation with customers recently. The best I've found was to tell them:
"You're definitely right we cannot loose the .eu. So we gonna redirect it to the BESTDOMAINE.com as main website. So people will still find you and you'll get more customers and will keep the .eu."
Then you can provide some technical arguments explaining that if he sticks to this position he will loose business.
In my case it worked out
From 50掳 in Dubai
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Do Wordpress sites outrank SquareSpace?
I was a big fan of Wordpress. I used it for 10 years. However, because I run a very small business, the constant upkeep needed on WP in the end started to frustrate me in the end, so I moved to SquareSpace. However, I am beginning to question my decision, as one of my sites is struggling really badly, and I mean badly. The other sites are okay. So I started asking around, and most people are saying there shouldn't be a difference. A few people have said their Wordpress sites always outranks their SquareSpace sites. Then I read what Rand Fishkin聽said in the below Twitter thread, now I am even more confused. I am very reluctant to move to Wordpress, its just so much hassle. But at the same time, if a site doesn't get much traffic then it's useless. https://twitter.com/drew_pickard/status/991659074134556673 https://twitter.com/randfish/status/991974456477278209 Please let me know your thoughts and experience.
Web Design | | RyanUK0 -
Moving to new site. Should I take old blog posts with me?
Our company website has needed a complete overhaul for some time now and the new one is almost ready to go live. 聽We also have a separate "news" site that is houses around 800 blog posts and news items. 聽(That news site will be thrown away because it's on a completely different domain and causes confusion.) So we have a main site with about 100 decent blog posts and a separate news site with 800 poor posts. I plan on bringing all the main site blog posts over to the new site (both WordPress), but my question is whether or not to bring over the news site posts? 聽All, handful, none? Another issue is the news site doesn't have Google Analytics, so I'm not sure if any posts actually generate traffic, but I can from the main site we do get some referrals from it. As far as quality of content goes, it's poor. 聽Not sure who wrote it all, but it's mainly text press releases that aren't very interesting. Is it worth bringing over for SEO purposes or simply delete the site and create a mass redirect so all of those pages will direct to the new website's blog page? Any help is greatly appreciated.
Web Design | | codyfrew0 -
How long should an old site redirecting to a new site remain activated on a server?
Once I switch a site to a new domain (with links to corresponding/relative pages), will I have to keep the old site live forever for those links to work, or how long should I wait before I inactivate the old site on our server?
Web Design | | jwanner0 -
Lots of Listing Pages with Thin Content on Real Estate Web Site-Best to Set them to No-Index?
Greetings Moz Community: As a commercial real estate broker in Manhattan I run a web site with over 600 pages. Basically the pages are organized in the following categories: 1. Neighborhoods (Example:http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/neighborhoods/midtown-manhattan) 聽25 PAGES Low bounce rate 2. Types of Space聽(Example:http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/commercial-space/loft-space)聽
Web Design | | Kingalan1
15 PAGES聽Low bounce rate. 3. Blog聽(Example:http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/blog/how-long-does-leasing-process-take聽
30 PAGES Medium/high bounce rate 4. Services聽(Example:http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/brokerage-services/relocate-to-new-office-space) 聽High bounce rate
3 PAGES 5. About Us聽(Example:http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/about-us/what-we-do
4 PAGES High bounce rate 6. Listings聽(Example:http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/listings/305-fifth-avenue-office-suite-1340sf)
300 PAGES High bounce rate (65%), thin content 7. Buildings聽(Example:http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/928-broadway
300 PAGES 聽Very high bounce rate (exceeding 75%) Most of the listing pages do not have more than 100 words. 聽My SEO firm is advising me to set them "No-Index, Follow". They believe the thin content could be hurting me. Is this an acceptable strategy? I am concerned that when Google detects 300 pages set to "No-Follow" they could interpret this as the site seeking to hide something and penalize us. Also, the building pages have a low click thru rate. Would it make sense to set them to "No-Follow" as well? Basically, would it increase authority in Google's eyes if we set pages that have thin content and/or low click thru rates to "No-Follow"? Any harm in doing this for about half the pages on the site? I might add that while I don't suffer from any manual penalty volume has gone down substantially in the last month. We upgraded the site in early June and somehow 175 pages were submitted to Google 聽that should not have been indexed. A removal request has been made for those pages. Prior to that we were hit by Panda in April 2012 with search volume dropping from about 7,000 per month to 3,000 per month. Volume had increased back to 4,500 by April this year only to start tanking again. It was down to 3,600 in June. About 30 toxic links were removed in late April and a disavow file was submitted with Google in late April for removal of links from 80 toxic domains. Thanks in advance for your responses!! Alan0 -
How to bounce back after a new url & new site design?
About a month ago, my company changed domains (from the long-established www.imageworksstudio.com to the new www.imageworkscreative.com) and also did a complete overhaul of our site.聽 We tried to do everything necessary to keep Google happy as we went through this change, but we've suffered a drastic loss of both rankings and traffic. I know that can happen as a result of a redesign AND as a result of a new domain, but I'm wondering how long you would expect it to take before we bounced back and also, what can we do in the meantime to improve?
Web Design | | ScottImageWorks0 -
Is it better to redirect a url or set up a landing page for a new site?
Hi, One of our clients has got a new website but is still getting quite a lot of traffic to her old site which has a page authority of 30 on the home page and has about 20 external backlinks. It's on a different hosting package so a different C block but I was wondering if anyone could advise if it would be better to simply redirect this page to the new site or set up a landing page on this domain simply saying "Site has moved, you can now find us here..." sort of idea. Any advice would be much appreciated Thanks
Web Design | | Will_Craig0 -
The use of foreign characters and capital letters in URL's?
Hello all, We have 4 language domains for our website, and a number of our Spanish landing pages are written using Spanish characters - most notably: 帽 and 贸. We have done our research around the web and realised that many of the top competitors for keywords such as Dise帽o Web (web design) and Aplicai贸n iPhone (iphone application) DO NOT use these special chacracters in their URL structure. Here is an example of our URL's EX:聽 http://www.twago.es/expert/Dise帽o-Web/Dise帽o-Web However when I simply copy paste a URL that contains a special character it is automatically translated and encoded. EX: http://www.twago.es/expert/Aplicaci贸n-iPhone/Aplicaci贸n-iPhone (When written out long had it appears: http://www.twago.es/expert/Aplicaci贸n-iPhone/Aplicaci贸n-iPhone My first question is, seeing how the overwhelming majority of website URL's DO NOT contain special characters (and even for Spanish/German characters these are simply written using the standard English latin alphabet) is there a negative effect on our SEO rankings/efforts because we are using special characters? When we write anchor text for backlinks to these pages we USE the special characteristics in the anchor text (so does most other competitors). Does the anchor text have to exactly I know most webbrowsers can understand the special characters, especially when returning search results to users that either type the special characters within their search query (or not). But we seem to think that if we were doing the right thing, then why does everyone else do it differently? My second question is the same, but focusing on the use of Capital letters in our URL structure. NOTE: When we do a broken link check with some link tools (such as xenu) the URL's that contain the special characters in Spanish are marked as "broken". Is this a related issue? Any help anyone could give us would be greatly appreciated! Thanks, David from twago
Web Design | | wdziedzic0 -
Site-wide footer links or single "website credits" page?
I see that you have already answered this question before back in 2007 (http://www.seomoz.org/qa/view/2163), but wanted to ask your current opinion on the same question: Should I add a site-wide footer link to my client websites pointing to my website, or should I create a "website credits" page on my clients site, add this to the footer and then link from within this page out to my website?
Web Design | | eseyo0