Hello All,
I'm working for a company that has many distributors worldwide. Each distributor is its own company but at the same time is branded with our main company’s name.
e.g. Our main company is in the UK and we sell to our distributors in USA, Ireland, etc.
We produce each distributor’s catalogue and give them a website. (Sub directory of our domain).
The current solution works as we have links to the country specific sub directories on the main landing page.
e.g.
www.yourdomain.com > flags linking to each sub directory (country site).
My problem
I’ve recently joined the company as the web master/developer and I’ve just rebuilt the UK website and it’s doing well but now I’m at the point where I need to roll out the website to the country specific partners. I want to keep the same code base and use separate database’s to split the products/customers.
So I've been trying to figure out the best way to approach this. I either keep the current sub directory solution I mentioned above (which was not done by me) or go with another solution to my problem.
Here's some solutions I've come up with.
Solution One
Have one website url yourdomain.com and use geolocation to serve the right content and pricing.
Pro’s
A user won’t have to choose a country unless they have been given the wrong one.
No duplicated content
Con’s
Geolocation isn’t perfect and will give users the wrong content sometimes.
How will a search engine see this?
Solution Two
Have many tld's yourdomain.co.uk, yourdomain.com, yourdomain.de, etc.
Pro’s
Each distributor has their own website which is good from their point of view.
Con’s
Each website sells the same products thus diluting SERP’s
How would you handle this situation? Any more ideas?
Thanks in Advance.
