Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I am starting up a new website, which I will want to rank globally.
My question is: Is it worth registering all country TLD domain's purely for SEO purposes?
We want the site to rank locally in every country possible for an international based product, which is relevant to their search.
If the cost of these TLD's, and the fact that we are not buying them just so that someone else can't doesn't come into the equation, do you think it is worth it purely for SEO reasons.
If it is worth it, how would you manage this? Would you need a unique site for each TLD? or would you just duplicate the site on each TLD? or would a redirect to the .com version be the best option?
I'm guessing by doing the latter this will give us no boost with local rankings though.
Thanks in advance for your comments.
Realistically , from an SEO point of view , maintaining too many live sites could be an administrative nightmare for the sake of picking up local traffic, especially when things need to be adjusted.
But others here may say differently.
just to clarify, not too concerned about the commercial perspective, and securing the local domain names to stop others from using them.
we are really more concerned about gaining as much local traffic as possible seeing as it is a very international site.
basically, we are offering widgets. people from many different countries will be searching for widgets abroad, and we want to attempt to rank on their local search engines, as we are not focussed solely on one country.
my question is: is buying a tld for each of these countries the best way to do this? or another option could be to have a country specifc subdomain?
one concern i have is duplicate content? will this be an issue if we have a very similar version of the site, with only a different tld?
thanks in advance.
I believe there are methods to divide your site regions into sub folders and geo target these via WMT. At this point you'll probably get better inputs from other good members here who might have better 1st hand experience than me. I understand it's been a successful strategy with folks like IBM and their multi lingual / geo site networks. But then SEO may not be a major marketing tool for them, so they may have had other things in mind.
[edited by: Whitey at 1:29 am (utc) on Jan. 9, 2009]
This will be my 19th year of doing precisely what you ask therefore I shall give very brief answers:
I am starting up a new website, which I will want to rank globally.
All sites can rank globally.
My question is: Is it worth registering all country TLD domain's purely for SEO purposes?
No, too expensive and not necessary.
We want the site to rank locally in every country possible for an international based product, which is relevant to their search.
One comprehensive site can do that IF you are merely selling/supplying widget products. I assume that you are NOT the actual widget producer NOR will you have office/sales based in many countries?
If the cost of these TLD's, and the fact that we are not buying them just so that someone else can't doesn't come into the equation, do you think it is worth it purely for SEO reasons.
No, not unless you decide to construct regional sites in the most popular languages and then it would be beneficial. Realistically you need no more than the ten most popular languages.
If it is worth it, how would you manage this? Would you need a unique site for each TLD? or would you just duplicate the site on each TLD? or would a redirect to the .com version be the best option?
If you construct a unique site for each TLD then they would be hosted separately and preferably in the main target country language.
I'm guessing by doing the latter this will give us no boost with local rankings though.
Yes...honestly you need some serious professional help to do all this, it is not something you sit at home with an off-the-shelf CMS and complete in a few hours.
At the end of the day it will depend just how large your company is and how deep are the pockets and how much time and effort you are prepared to allocate to it?
For instance:
1. How many product lines are involved?
2. How do you intend to deliver the products?
3. How do you intend to handle returns?
4. Do you intend having an international call centre?
5. Are you au fait with the distance selling laws in each country?
There are many, many questions to be answered by your company before even embarking on such a project however since I have no idea what kind of widget you provide I have no idea whether it would be a relatively simple or a monumental task.
Hope that helps...USD 100.00 please:-)
