Site Migration Question

[relding]

Hello,

I have a globally accessed (with UK bias) site with a .com domain name. The site is expanding to include country specific content. The plan is to use the domain name.com/uk for UK specific content, .com/us for us specific content and .com/au for Australia sprecific content and do a geoIP redirect for the specific country of access.

The problem I have with this is that the .com domain name would not exist as a standalone landing page. Does anyone know if it would be better to have a generic landing page that retains some generic content to preserve the indexed content and 'link juice' or if it's ok to do a redirect from the .com according to country? I'm thinking it would be better to retain the .com domain and have a 'country selector' option??!! Any thoughts greatly received.

Thanks,

Rob

[activeco]

As you don't redirect to tld's, you'll have to have a default root page anyway or to redirect it to one of the directories.
Personally I would go with country selection, utilizing the most basic keywords.

[incrediblehelp]

yes retain all domains and let the users and engines decide where to go themselves.

[cbosleeds]

I have to agree with Incredible Help here, especially since testing for visitor location by IP address is never 100% reliable

[heavener]

I ran a multi-country front door web site for a multi-national company (now merged out of existence, sadly), as well as running the web site for the US subsidiary. Over a three year period, I got both sites from zero presence (over 2/3s of the pages were orphans when I took over) to in the top three positions in Yahoo, Google, and MSN.

Each country had its own web site with its own in-country TLD and domain. The US site performed the same way, using a second domain that I bought (tallyus). The main site (tally.com) had a gateway page with a javascript-driven rotation of 20 mixed product photos from worldwide (not all products were sold in all countries).

In addition, the gateway page contained keywords that encompassed everything we believed might draw searches anywhere in the world (about 40 words total, all in English). The Javascript rotation hot-linked to each country as its product(s) displayed and there were the obligatory text links at the bottom (oh, boy, did the foreign subsidiaries bitch about that - until the page appeared in every search they performed).

There was really no secret to what was accomplished. I worked with the US product marketing managers and we tested and tested and tested different combinations of keywords. It took three years to climb into the penthouse but a year after the tally web server was shut down post-merger, the site still ranked in the first two pages of the search engines.

Michael

[relding]

Ok, thanks for your thoughts.

To summarise, I retain all domains and have a landing page with generic content and country selector to the other country specific domains to avoid the IP selector issues.

Many thanks for your help Gentlemen.

R

[morestar]

Originally Posted by relding

Ok, thanks for your thoughts.

To summarise, I retain all domains and have a landing page with generic content and country selector to the other country specific domains to avoid the IP selector issues.

Many thanks for your help Gentlemen.

R

yes retain as in when you said: name.com/uk for UK specific content, .com/us for us specific content and .com/au for Australia sprecific content...