Greetings from Austria!
My Problem: I have an .com-domain I would like to rank in the german, austrian and swiss Google, since those are our target markets. The website itself is in german.
From my experience with an .at-domain I found that it is quite hard to rank in a country for which you dont use a cTLD or target it via webmaster-tools.
So i had the plan to use WPML (its a Wordpress-Site) to make three versions:
.com/de
.com/at
.com/ch
and target each to the respective country via the Webmaster-Tools.
How to do that via WPML is clear, but 3 questions arose:
- If every user is redirected to his subfolder, what happens to the "pure" .com-domain? Does it then disappear after a while in the SERPs, since every country has its own page?
- Is it possible to geotarget the pure .com to Austria and /de and /ch Subfolders to other countries? Or does geotargeting of a domain overwrite the targeting of the subfolders?
- Some people say that its not useful to do this at all. But I did not had the basic idea out of nowhere. On many sites (like Yoast I read that this would be a smart idea to have a site for every country). Any ideas on this topic?
Greetings Markus