Country extensionsl

[joker]

Please could someone help me - we have devised a new website where local searches and information could be returned when customers search for information about specific countries from any country worldwide. The question is do we buy national extensions - we have it all on .com at present how would this affect search engines ratings etc should we get .eu .au .za etc etc

thankyou

[inertia]

Hhhm. Good question. Where is your principal traffic going to come from?

[incrediblehelp]

Well joker if it aint broke no reason to fix it. Are you getting your ideal traffic levels from one domain?

[fernimac]

I think that the right thing to do would be the following: if you have plenty of content for each country, you should buy the country extensions of your domain. Google.es, google.fr and so give local sites a bonus when they have the same country extension and or are hosted under local IP's. Those two factors tell Google that domain belongs to that country. The negative part is that it will be harder to obtain popularity for different domains than for just a .com domain.

[steveareeno]

Our site is a .com and has many regional extensions to point to it via a 301. We puchased these to secure our brand names in these counties as well as to possibly give us a little more of a foothold on regional searches in these countries.

As mentioned, these point back to the .com site essentially but it has been divided into region/language subdomains. So, the .FR domain may point to FR-EU.website.com while the .DE points to DE-EU.website.com for example. Each of these "core" domains that have the region/language extensions offers unique content so there is no duplicate content issues. Since employing this startegy in August, we have seen some pretty good results in my opinion. Each is ranked on search engines independantly and all but one has a PR of 3 or 4.

This is how we did it and is food for thought for you.

[pubsit1000]

I believe steveareeno's approach is the best. But in order for this strategy to work you need content specifically created for those languages.

[DrTandem1]

Usually, you or your business need to be located within a country to use its national extension.

[datetopia]

There are some seo benefits for having multiple country extensions for your domain. You could register multiple times in major directories (under regional sections for each country) and also you can have your website to special directories and indexes that only accept local websites.

[blitzen]

Our site is dot-com and we are, indeed, a valid US company.
Our host is in Canada.
When I search the same keyword from Google USA, the site is positioned lower then when I search the same keyword from Google.ca.

[khurramali]

Google does it all too well, so if you have the funds then do it their way.

but even if you do not plan to go all the way, it is a good idea to buy the domain extensions to protect your trademark.

[fernimac]

Yes, that is good advice: buy your domain with the most important country extensions just to protect your trademark. Then, I would suggest you build microsites in each of these domains instead of just making a 301 redirect from them to the canonical domain. In these microsites, be sure you include the most basic information about you and what you offer in the language of the market you are targeting and with much more weight on text than you would do in your main site. The key here is having a site that is much more indexable even if it is not so usable. Then, point the links in that microsite to your main site. The will work as showrooms for your main site and will keep on sending qualified traffic to your site.

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