Hello all,

We have an idea about good product in Europe but I'd like to ask you for help. We are in preparation for new website, let's say www.mywebsite.com and we'd like to open it for 15 European markets - content will be the same but in national language and we'll try to optimize for each specific market. Domain name will be in English (mywebsite) and we also bought domain names, where possible, all the time with English name and the end is typical for every market (mywebsite.ru, mywebsite.de, mywebsite.it ...). This way we'd like to build one mark for all markets (MyWebsite), we'd like to be as close to people specifics as possible. We have country cooperators in each country prepared for it.

We need to know... We'd like to build one mark (same for all markets) but URLs will be different (at the end - .it, .pl, .de). Our idea is to redirect Italian visitor from mywebsite.it to mywebsite.com/it all the time and redirect Polish visitor from mywebsite.pl to mywebsite.com/pl. What do you think about this and how we will build links and everything on local markets? We will build links in Italy to mywebsite.com/it or we will ask webmasters to link to us to mywebsite.it and after this 301 redirect will bring them to us. Will these links bring us some "google points" (to mywebsite.com/it URL)? How google in Italy will index our website, as mywebsite.com/it or mywebsite.it? In this case it is possible that we will be on 1st place for "my website" phrase in Italy?

The idea about so many language versions on one domain is because this way we'd like to build strong traffic on one website, which we can report, check, show... This way we'll be big player, in case of existence 15 separate domain names, our power will be not so big.

Thank you for your time and I will wait for interesting posts..

Doesn't sound like a very good idea to me. Stick to one site. I like the .it better than the sub-directory /it.

1. Maybe
2. Will probably index both then determine which one is more authentic.
3. It's gonna' need more than just domain names and funky redirects if you are looking for keyphrases of any competitiveness.

I would think your "power" to be overall significantly stronger with the 15 domains.

For the long term, you are better off creating country-specific domains, and building up links for each. Google and other engines will give preference to county/language-specific TLDs (top level domains) for searches from those countries or in those languages, so leverage that advantage. I think over time this will give you much better results.

The redirect scheme will not help you. The 301 just say's to send the link juice to the other site, so just work on building links to those sites from other sites within each country. Of course, link to these country sites from your main site, and cross link all your sites -- that will help your linking for all, and some of the link juice you collect on your main site will flow to the others.

You could also create country/language-specific landing pages on your main site, and then provide links into your other sites to deeper pages. Just try not to duplicate content when you do that (should not be hard if one page per country).

Be careful with multiple English sites (.au, .uk, etc) -- that can get you into duplicate content issues, though Google now says they try to take account for this (presumably routing UK sourced traffic to .uk, etc).

I don't think there is anything wrong with redirectirng yor vistors from .it to yourwebsite.com/it and so on for other languages. Just make sure that the redirection is done by 301 in .htaccess. This way your main website will not get penalised for duplicate content. I can see the advantage of hosting all the language pages in the sub directory of the domain domain. All the content will be treated as a part of the main domain so you can easily concentrate you search engine optimisation on the main website. We all know how difficult it will be to work on search engine optimisation for all sites independently.

- thank you for your posts. I just saw this info:
"The 301 just say's to send the link juice to the other site, so just work on building links to those sites from other sites within each country."
Do you think that link juice will be sent to mydomain.com/it in case that I will have couple of links from Italian websites to mydomain.it? I thought that redirect will only sent some traffic over there without juice...

Sure. You can cross-link your sites and they will benefit each other, and there is no problem linking from www.domain.it pages to www.mydomain.com/it (as long as content is unique across the sites). Keep in mind this is only one link or set of links, so you need to do that additional link building to each domain, but you will still benefit, and there is no harm at all in doing this.

Thanks and what about link from Italian website, for example aaa.it, to our mydomain. It will be better if they will link to us to mydomain.it or mydomain.com/it. Also how can I link from mydomain.it to mydomain.com/it as mydomain.it has no content?... it is pernament redirect..