SES London: Domain Name Issues

[Brittany]

Those of you who have sites in multiple languages might want to read Garrett's article on SES London, which brought up the following domain name issue:

Originally Posted by Garrett

Alan brought up an issue he has with his own site that he had resolved - he's got both German and English versions of his site and has separate folders for them. Now it's considered "better" to have separate domains with "language/country specific top level domains for the different language content." ...

Here's what he learned he should do:

- Find a web host in the US and/or UK to register the .co.uk / .com pages, making sure there are no trademark violation issues first.

- Move the English language content from the German tld /en/ directory to the uk/com domains. Change the .co.uk content to be more in line with the UK market (avoiding duplicate content and helping conversion by specific Geo targeting). If you have a .com then change the content to be more US focused.

- Use 301 moved permanently in the .htaccess on the .de domain to make sure that there is search engine friendly redirection to the English language websites (.com or .co.uk) Never use meta refresh or javascript redirection. (Yahoo has issues with 301s though -- ed.)

- Pursuade all those linking to the old /en/ folder to switch to the new .co.uk domains / .com domains.

Got questions? This article is currently being discussed on WebProWorld here...

[bhartzer]

I'm glad to hear this. We're using different domains for different languages--the English is dot com, the Portuguese is dot com dot br, and our Spanish is dot com dot mx.

[xmx]

Brittany, from the quotes I understand that in that case the tld was .de, I also agree to have the english version on a general or english tld.
I think anyway there is no need to buy a french, a spanish and a german tld if you provide translation to those languages on a .com domain.

[sfowler]

I'm not convinced. I have got nowhere with the English text on a dot at site. I think the dot com etc. use the IP address. There can be no other explanation for madurusa.com being so far ahead of madur.at. I am going to reactivate madur.com and host it in the US or Britain and see what happens. People here tend to search for sites in German, whilst in Germany they will mostly look for sites in Germany, so I would go for a dot de if possible. Dot at is not so bad though. Spanish text is therefore only Spanish on a dor es or Sout hAmerican site or server. The meta tag for language is jsut a waste of time.