Thanks for this helpful article Mike. While your article is the clearest I've found on the subject, I'm still having a hard time deciding between using subdomains or subdirectories for our international family tree website (http://mundia.com).
We currently have a sub-domain set up for each individual country we're targeting (e.g. http://de.mundia.com for Germany) and within Google Webmaster Tools we've configured each subdomain to target the correct country location. Also when a user enters our main address http://mundia.com they are automatically forwarded to the correct subdomain based on the user's geographic location.
From your article, it would seem that this is a great approach for targeting different regional markets, the down side however is that our site authority and trust is divided between all our subdomains.
However, irrelevant of the users location, the services that we provide on our site are identical and the site is structured in the same way. The only difference is the default language and the fact that on each subdomain, we plan to create landing pages optimized to target language specific search phrases. Based on your comments about semantics, it sounds like you're suggesting it might be better for us to use subdirectories.
It would be greatly appreciated if you could have a quick look at our site and let me know what you think. Another question that I have is in regards to the landing pages. Is it also possible within Google Webmaster Tools to target subdirectories of our main domain to specific countries much as you can do for subdomains? Lastly we have a blog that is currently set up at http://blog.mundia.com. Since this blog will be used primarily for driving traffic to the main site I assume we should move this to http://mundia.com/blog?
Thanks so much for your help!
Subdomain vs Subdirectories
Thanks for this helpful article Mike. While your article is the clearest I've found on the subject, I'm still having a hard time deciding between using subdomains or subdirectories for our international family tree website (http://mundia.com).
We currently have a sub-domain set up for each individual country we're targeting (e.g. http://de.mundia.com for Germany) and within Google Webmaster Tools we've configured each subdomain to target the correct country location. Also when a user enters our main address http://mundia.com they are automatically forwarded to the correct subdomain based on the user's geographic location.
From your article, it would seem that this is a great approach for targeting different regional markets, the down side however is that our site authority and trust is divided between all our subdomains.
However, irrelevant of the users location, the services that we provide on our site are identical and the site is structured in the same way. The only difference is the default language and the fact that on each subdomain, we plan to create landing pages optimized to target language specific search phrases. Based on your comments about semantics, it sounds like you're suggesting it might be better for us to use subdirectories.
It would be greatly appreciated if you could have a quick look at our site and let me know what you think. Another question that I have is in regards to the landing pages. Is it also possible within Google Webmaster Tools to target subdirectories of our main domain to specific countries much as you can do for subdomains? Lastly we have a blog that is currently set up at http://blog.mundia.com. Since this blog will be used primarily for driving traffic to the main site I assume we should move this to http://mundia.com/blog?
Thanks so much for your help!