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I'm in the process of creating alternative versions of our website, to be more precise an Italian, French, American English and Spanish versions - with the aim to provide location dependent information for individual locations. There are three setups I can think of but all seem to have their own problems...

  1. Subdomains, so it.website.com, fr.website.com etc. The one bonus with this setup is we could host the subdomains on different servers, and potentially reduce load time by having the American site served by an American server. However in terms of SEO your effectively creating a new website (depending on what you read) so rankings may be more difficult.
  2. Folders, so website.com/it/ etc. The bonus with this setup is that your building on you main websites reputation, so in theory should be easier to rank, interestingly this is the method apple use. However the one downside is the site would all be served from the same server location? So load times maybe affected?
  3. The third option is really the same as the first and has the same advantages, using website.it, website.fr but has an obvious additional outlay for the domains.

Thanks for any help.

Dave

Dave Smith
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  • Thank you for the question, I like see how people think too. One thing I could think of for option 3 is you will have to register each domain for each country. If your domain name is popular, it might not be always available. Yahoo seems to use option 1, and Google is using option 3. – Dino Tw Mar 13 '15 at 16:13
  • Thanks Dino, thankfully at this time of speaking the domain names are available - however I know certain locations (I think french .fr's - don't quote me) require a french address to register. My main concern is that we've spent a lot of time streamlining the site, GZIPing etc, and its responding well in Google because of these changes. Load times for users based in the UK and Europe at around 1-2 seconds where locations such as America are much longer - so hosting a subdomain or domain.us on an American server would resolve that... – Dave Smith Mar 13 '15 at 16:24
  • ... I'm just not sure if having all these subdomains and domains is the right way to go about it. Certainly when Apple are using the folder solution i.e domain.com/fr/ – Dave Smith Mar 13 '15 at 16:27
  • For geography concern, it might be resolvable by setting up load balancers(or something like that) to redirect the traffic to the corresponding servers. But you might want to consult networking professionals for the best solution. – Dino Tw Mar 13 '15 at 17:04
  • I think since you can see 3 options being using by major companies, any way will be fine. The main concern would be more about the network configuration. – Dino Tw Mar 13 '15 at 17:08

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