Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Working with multi-regional websites

Webmaster Central Blog

Official news on crawling and indexing sites for the Google index

Working with multi-regional websites

Friday, March 12, 2010

multilingualPreparing for global websitesPlanning multi-regional websites

ccTLDs (country-code top level domain names): These are tied to a specific country (for example .de for Germany, .cn for China). Users and search engines use this as a strong sign that your website is explicitly for a certain country.

gTLDs (generic top level domain names): These are not tied to a specific country. Examples of gTLds are .com, .net, .org, .museum. Google sees regional top level domain names such as .eu and .asia as gTLDs, since they cannot be tied to a specific country. We also treat some vanity ccTLDs (such as .tv, .me, etc.) as gTLDs as we've found that users and webmasters frequently see these as being more generic than country-targeted (we don't have a complete list of such vanity ccTLDs that we treat as gTLDs as it may change over time). You can set geotargeting for websites with gTLDs using the Webmaster Tools Geographic Target setting.

Geotargeting factors

Use of a ccTLD is generally a strong signal for users since it explicitly specifies a single country in an unmistakable way.
or
Webmaster Tools' manual geotargeting for gTLDs (this can be on a domain, subdomain or subdirectory level); more information on this can be found in our blog post and in the Help Center. With region tags from geotargeting being shown in search results, this method is also very clear to users. Please keep in mind that it generally does not make sense to set a geographic target if the same pages on your site target more than a single country (say, all German-speaking countries) — just write in that language and do not use the geotargeting setting (more on writing in other languages will follow soon!).

Server location (through the IP address of the server) is frequently near your users. However, some websites use distributed content delivery networks (CDNs) or are hosted in a country with better webserver infrastructure, so we try not to rely on the server location alone.

Other signals can give us hints. This could be from local addresses & phone numbers on the pages, use of local language and currency, links from other local sites, and/or the use of Google's Local Business Center (where available).

URL structures

ccTLDs
eg: example.de, example.fr

Subdomains with gTLDs
eg: de.site.com, fr.site.com, etc.

Subdirectories with gTLDs
eg: site.com/de/, site.com/fr/, etc.

URL parameters
eg: site.com?loc=de, ?country=france, etc.

pros (+)
- clear geotargeting
- server location is irrelevant
- easy separation of sites
- legal requirements (sometimes)

pros (+)
- easy to set up
- can use Webmaster Tools geotargeting
- allows different server locations
- easy separation of sites

pros (+)
- easy to set up
- can use Webmaster Tools geotargeting
- low maintenance (same host)

pros (+)
(not recommended)

cons (-)
- expensive (+ availability)
- more infrastructure
- ccTLD requirements (sometimes)

cons (-)
- users might not recognize geotargeting from the URL alone (is "de" the language or country?)

cons (-)
- users might not recognize geotargeting from the URL alone
- single server location
- separation of sites harder

cons (-)
- segmentation based on the URL is difficult
- users might not recognize geotargeting from the URL alone
- geotargeting in Webmaster Tools is not possible

Dealing with duplicate content on global websitesrobots.txt file"noindex" robots meta tagredirect"rel=canonical" link elementjoin the discussionBis baldWritten by John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst, Google Switzerland