5

My project is in 7 languages. For each language, we bought a domain. The project already has some success. Some domains have many visitors from search engines, some not so many.

When we launched, our competitor launched the same project on 7 languages, but he put languages on 1 domain.

Now he has 32 times more visitors, but his design and content are not the best.

  • Do you think that just one domain could increase the traffic?
  • Is it worth to move 7 languages on 1 domain?
Improve this question
1
  • Your competitor might be outranking you because of various other factors than the question you have asked. If you have similar landing pages across all these individual domains, did you setup "hreflang" tags to optimize properly?
    – idk
    Commented Feb 14, 2019 at 7:58

3 Answers 3

Reset to default
2

There are two types of method for multilingual websites.

  1. First is using sub-domain for each language (the same as using separate domains).

    https://en.example.com/

https://fr.example.com/

    As you may know, each sub-domains ranking separately and has no affect on your root domain. Google identify each sub-domain as an independent website. Normally you may experience situation as like as you mentioned. I have already multilingual website and suggest next type:

  2. Second is using sub-directory for each languages, it is more popular in most cases because google identify all languages of your website as a single website.

    https://example.com/en

https://example.com/fr

    In this case each sub-directory try to get ranking higher not only for themselves but also for other directories and also your root domain. As a result, I suggest you to use subdirectory and redirect all your domains to new addresses.

Improve this answer
3
  • 3
    There are at least two other methods: 3) using different domain names completely, as is the case of the question and 4) using same URLs but changing language base on content-negotiation
    – Patrick Mevzek
    Commented Feb 12, 2019 at 14:27
  • 1
    "each sub-domains ranking separately and has no affect on your root domain" is usually false. There are some exceptions where Google treats subdomains as separate sites when they are given out to different people (eg blogspot), but most of the time when all the subdomains of a site are owned by the same person and linked together, Google sees it all as one big site. See Do subdomains help/hurt SEO?
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    Commented Feb 13, 2019 at 20:55
  • I like how they put it here: seocrunches.com/…. It's not that Google thinks that the subdomain and the domain are separate sites, it's that by making a subdomain the webmaster seems to be indicating a separation between what content is provided one versus the other. But are translated versions of the same copy the "same" content? Maybe in a Strings world they are not, but in a Things world they certainly are...
    – I Capulet
    Commented Sep 15, 2020 at 21:26
1

It makes no difference what you do for SEO reasons as long as you link the domains using the following:

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="es" href="https://www.domain.es/" />

You are telling Google that the above domain is for the Spanish language for the web page.

Google rates websites according to user location, so even if your website is number one in France and you link to the Spanish site, the Spanish one will not necessarily score as well in Spain, and the French one probably won't even appear.

I tested this with English sites. We have a co.uk & .com. In the UK, the co.uk site appeared top in search results, when I was in the US, the .com one positioned not as well, and this changed for each state.

I recommend highly adding Google analytics to the page so Google can monitor what users do as this will help your ranking. If you don't, how will Google know if someone went to the domain from an email or direct link?

Also make sure you set the HTML tag for each page according to the page language

<html lang="es">
Improve this answer
0

Subdomains work better as they are considered as separate sub-sites. However, you have already bought 7 domains and crated 7 language versions of your main website, haven't you?

It looks easier to drive traffic to one portal and to distribute it from there, based on the language preferences of the website visitors and based on their country, region, etc. I don't know what do you want to achieve here - to established brands for different markets or simply to target customers who speak different languages.

It looks to me that you can continue to operate those 7 domains and websites you have, but you need a marketing concept on how to position them in the local markets, develop them and how to distribute the web traffic between those websites.

If you put them on different hosts, different Cloud networks, this will improve your chances to reach the local audience, but it comes with a greater management effort.

Improve this answer
1
  • Thank you for the useful info in your answer, but it's generally frowned upon here to recommend specific services, whether or not they are your own.
    – Maximillian Laumeister ♦
    Commented Feb 13, 2019 at 20:15

Your Answer

By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our terms of service and acknowledge you have read our privacy policy.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.