Domain Name to Support Multilingual & Different marketplace

[SteveJohn155]

Hello,

I'm coming up with e-commerce website for a niche market place and I'm based out of India. I'm focusing these many marketplace apart fro India:

Australia
Japan
France
Germany
UK
Switzerland
Taiwan
China
Russia
Italy
UAE
Germany

I have couple of daunting questions:

1) What is the best way to enter this different place"

a) I would like to Buy Country Domain CC TLD for each of this market place but I see for some countries like .au, it, china, .de etc needs local presence to register the domain as per Wikipedia or some kind of restriction but also I did speak to few European domain registry (europeregistry.com) , they claim I can still register and they will provide local details on behalf of me for few domains ..Not sure How far this is legal.

b) Also I see different Approach(sub-domain) from establish player to address on multilingual for different country. Not sure whether sub-domain is same as CC TLD's approach, if built and marketed properly.

Example 1) de.godaddy.com/ to Address German
2) it.godaddy.com/ to address Italy

Example 2) zomato.com/id/auckland to Address Australia market
zomato.com/id/doha to Address UAE market

2) Having sub-domain name under dot com to address these restricted country is right approach.
or To Go with CC TLD.s by finding partners this countries. Needless to say , I'm start-up not big brands like Go daddy.com to establish marketing campaign in each country. In case, you suggest to go for sub-domain approach-which is better - Godaddy or zomato

Please do provide your input to address this daunting question.

Regards,
Steve

 

[Joseph Green]

It won't matter as long as you do it correctly. You can add all of the subdomains or ccTLDs to Google Webmaster Tools to check the settings.

Helpful resources for you:

• http://moz.com/ugc/folders-vs-subdomains-vs-cctld-in-international-seo-an-overview

 

[SteveJohn155]

Thanks for the link...Look like this post is OLD, does this still holds good in to-day's SEO context and somehow conclusion part is not clear to me in this post.


I did like this aproach to gain from both CC TLD & Sub-Folder....What's your take.


-------------------------------------------------------------------
What's the view if you own the ccTLDs but, for cost, strategy and other reasons are using sub-domains with content mirroring, and you then choose to 301 the ccTLD to the appropriate content mirrror home page.
Is there any search advantage to be gained in using the ccTLD in this way?
As an example, IBM use ccTLDs but redirect back to a central site: ibm.de --> ibm.com/de/de
----------------------
Interesting, although ibm.de 301 redirects as you mention, if you google "ibm.de" you will see ibm.de in the index with sitelinks and all, very nice for german users. This will ofcourse improve the CTR for this search-term.
In theory ibm.de should not have been in the index, and they would not have gained anything from an SEO perspective. But if you become a brand like IBM, a lot of users will type ibm.de in the address field of their browser, and you would definately want to get hold of these users. So I would recommend buying the ccTLD's and 301 redirect them to the most relevant URL, if you don't use them actively

Speaking to 101domains.com support team- I got this info, they say you go and get domain registered with their trustee services:

IT domain - Registration 1 Year 19.95 USD Trustee 1 year 7.56 USD .FR Domain - Registration 1 Year 19.00 USD Trustee 1 year 24.96 USD .CH Domain - Registration 1 Year 18.95 USD .CO.UK Domain - Registration 1 Year 7.95 USD .DE Domain - Registration 1 Year 9.95 USD Trustee 1 year 15.00 USD .ES Domain - Registration 1 Year 17.00 USD

Just wanted to Understand from expertise who are here:
We have 3 Approaches to go when it comes to supporting Different market place:

1) Geotarget -Get CC TLD and focus on this market
2) Create Sub -domain (ex: it.godaddy.com)
3) Create Folder (my.site.com/de/)

I'm not able to conclude what is best may when it comes to focus on local domestic market, looks like each as its won Cons & Pros. Can anyone put in Order what could be the ideal way of supporting different marketplace from a start-up perspective.

 

[Rado_Ch]

Just wanted to Understand from expertise who are here:
We have 3 Approaches to go when it comes to supporting Different market place:

1) Geotarget -Get CC TLD and focus on this market
2) Create Sub -domain (ex: it.godaddy.com)
3) Create Folder (my.site.com/de/)

I'm not able to conclude what is best may when it comes to focus on local domestic market, looks like each as its won Cons & Pros. Can anyone put in Order what could be the ideal way of supporting different marketplace from a start-up perspective.

I'd say a country-specific TLD should be top on that list. Its the easiest way to target the local audience and much easier to do good SEO for local searches. As for the argument subfolder vs subdomain there have been many theories and speculations. The most reasonable information I got was from MOZ, where they explained that subfolders work a little better than subdomains...with the EXCEPTION of language-specific websites. As this seems to be exactly your case the subdomains might be a better idea than subfolders.

 

[Joseph Green]

We have 3 Approaches to go when it comes to supporting Different market place:

1) Geotarget -Get CC TLD and focus on this market
2) Create Sub -domain (ex: it.godaddy.com)
3) Create Folder (my.site.com/de/)

I'm not able to conclude what is best may when it comes to focus on local domestic market, looks like each as its won Cons & Pros.

As I mentioned, if you do it properly, it makes no difference.

If you want it to be automatically configured by search engines, then you should use ccTLDs.

If you want to use sub-domains or folders, then you should properly configure your site for search engines:

• International Targeting. To do this for Google, add your site's URL at the end of this URL, then visit it:
  https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/i18n?tid=geo&siteUrl=
• hreflang tags