Forum Moderators: phranque
I'm setting up multiple languages for a website and I know there are many ways to attempt this however I can only use FrontPage and know didly squat about api, perl, cgi script or any other diddle doo dahs for that matter :)
Anyway I've got a domain which I'll call site.com and I want to have other domains all around the world for my site i.e. site.fr, site.es, site.hk etc etc so that we can advertise accordingly in each country. What I was thinking of doing was to forward each of these .fr, .es, .hk.... domains to subdomains on the main site this way I only have to pay out for each domain registration rather than pay for each site to have its own hosting which would be too expensive and cumbersome for what we need. So my site.fr will forward to the subdomain france.site.com and so on and so forth. My question is will the site.fr and site.es etc be able to build up their own hit rate in google and the search engines if they are being forwarded to subdomains on my main site?
Also once i have about 10 different languages I'm gonna be nearing on about 500 - 1000 web pages which when it comes to updating the site is gonna be a nightmare, would it be easier for me to learn some kind of script now rather than face a wall of alterations in the future? I guess the answer will be yes, if this is so then roughly how long woould it take me to learn a script part time?
Thanks for your time :)
Bob
Losing 'local' - country TLD - domains may lose you the benfits of local search in those countries, especially if your sites are not locally hosted.
And the advantages? From what you've said, nil.
subdomains are treated no different to full domains by most SEs, so you are effectively moving all your local sites to new domains; no advantage to your 'core' domain, potential disaster for the local sites.
And you'll still need the domains to 301 from, so no saved cash.
Even if planned to drop them in 3-4 years time, the carnage you propose to unleash will cost way over a few dollars a year for each domain.
I think that almost covers it ... :)
I'm not sure if you are doing this for a client or yourself?
But I can set up a website for you in 10 languages on only one URL.
The language would be available via a drop down "choose" language.
I have about 70 sites running on this model and they ALL get indexed and get plenty of traffic from Google.
Let me know if you are interested, I'm a Canadian living in Thailand now and work for very reasonable rates.
Cheers!
((((((Quadrille))))))) I hear what you are saying so it seems local individual hosting in each country is best for search results in that country. I see although thinking about the business its a single product line with a unique name, I've just done some searches in the foreign sites and the english version comes up at the top on each one so perhaps my idea is ok after all? As Apart from having a forward from each .fr, .es, .hk domain etc to each subdomain I could also have a link to each language on every page of every site, hmmmm, a lot of work me thinks :(
In fact once we have the product selling in retail outlets in each country our internet sales drop anyway and the sites will be used more for information than anything else. I didn't totally understand everything you were telling me but how does that idea sound? :)
(((((Oimachi2)))) Thanks for the offer but we are on a very tight budget hence im the inhouse web guy on a song and a prayer :) if you wouldnt mind though could you send me the links to your sites so I can check out the drop down menu and the design of the multi language option? I wont be able to do the script thing but it might help with my design, no worries if you dont want to give away info I'll understand :)
Bob
local individual hosting in each country is best for search results
"I have about 70 sites running on this model and they ALL get indexed and get plenty of traffic from Google."
Maybe from Google.com ... but I very much doubt you get much from national Googles.
That might not matter; it all depends who / where the target audience is.
Good Luck!
Yes I'd say at a later date the ad fees will far outstrip the hosting fees but at present we are on the rickety edge financially and we want to get the sites up whilst we build up the business and then we will go for the advertising in the other countries when we can afford it, this will give me time to sort out the sites in between other work.
Hosting the domains on one server sounds sensible I'll check that option out :)
Thanks for all the input its very much appreciated!
Good luck to you all too :)
Bob
