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        4. Is a slash just as good as buying a country specific domain? .com/de vs .de

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        Is a slash just as good as buying a country specific domain? .com/de vs .de

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        • richardstrange
          richardstrange last edited by

          I guess this question comes in a few parts:

          1. Would Google read a 2-letter country code that is after the domain name (after the slash) and recognize it as a location (targeting that country)? Or does is just read it as it would a word.

          eg. www.marketing.com/de for a microsite for the Germans

          www.marketing.com/fr for a microsite for the French

          Or would it read the de and fr as words (not locations) in the url. In which case, would it have worse SEO (as people would tend to search "marketing france" not "marketing fr")?

          2. Which is better for SEO and rankings?

          Separate country specific domains:

          www.marketing.de and www.marketing.fr

          OR the use of subfolders in the url:

          www.marketing.com/de   and    www.marketing.com/fr

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • nvs.nim
            nvs.nim last edited by

            To achieve those different geotargeting options in Google Webmaster Tools you have to add every subdirectory as a different site, otherwise you can only target one country for the top-domain.

            You should add marketing.com/de and marketing.com/fr as separate sites to GWT and set the geolocation for each folder to the right country.

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • irvingw
              irvingw last edited by

              It doesn't matter, because in Google Webmaster Tools you can geo-target directories for specific countries, so there is no need for different TLD's for different regions. It seems to work well.

              Also, Google is smart enough to know that if a section is in German it should be shown in Google.de, if a section is in French it will be shown in Google.fr - it is the English sections that you definitely need to point Google in the right directions with.

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • jbrabants
                jbrabants last edited by

                To answer on your first question, Google doesn't read this as France or Germany, but that doesn't mean it is bad for your SEO.

                For example, having those different subdirectories in one domain can help you get lots of backlinks to one domain instead of backlinks to all your location based domains.

                To answer your second question, your URL doesn't do all of your SEO work... If you use the right title tags, urls, on-page elements you can rank with your .com domain for different languages.

                Yesterday I analysed a webshop that targets different countries (FR, NL, DE, ENG) but doesn't have different domains for each country and I must say that he was ranking for some competitive terms in several languages. If your overall SEO elements are good to target a certain language or country it doesn't matter that much if it is a .fr or .com/fr

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