Multiple URL strategies
I look at so many web projects where there has been lots of different but similar websites created by the company for different angles of their business, yet they are all marketing pretty much the same message. What tends to happen is these sites all kind of have the same look and feel but are selling the virtues independently of a particular product or division of the business. I guess the idea behind this sort of strategy is to spread yourself out over the Internet - try and make a bigger sales web. Unfortunately, I believe that this sort of strategy is missing one essential point in search engine and internet marketing. That being the value of a site is in it’s perceived authority and at the end of the day it’s number of links.
For example, those that follow this blog will know that one of our team, Mat, owns and operates Experience Queenstown. Mat regularly acquires strong Queenstown based domain names that are no longer used by their owners (that is, they have been left to expire). For example, he owns a lot of good taxi URLs. Mat does not try and develop a whole new site for each domain (or set of domains) he purchases rather he redirects all the URLs to their relevant pages within his Experience Queenstown website - thereby building up the overall number of links to his site and therefore the sites authority. The perceived authority value of Queenstown taxis does not just go up, but also the overall value of his site in all things Queenstown related (somewhat illustrated by the infamous Google page rank algorithm).
This is however an SEO strategy and in most cases the stuff I come across involves businesses that are running 5 or 6 domains each with only a handful of pages for each of their products and companies all linking together, just for the mere purpose of feeling like they have more stuff out there on the web. For example, I saw one such site that has it’s sort of corporate home page, then it’s got it’s coaching products which sits on a completely separate URL called something like Bobscoaching.com, then it has it’s corporate solutions which sit on a URL something like Bobscorporate.com and so on. Each URL home page has page ranks of about 20 or 3.
I don’t agree with this sort of strategy. I believe that in this case all sites would be better off being combined into one corporate site and the other URLs permanently redirected (see post on 301 redirects) to this one domain. I believe that this could raise the Google page rank to 3 or 4 and would give the site much more overall authority in all areas. The overall site would now have more incoming links, it would be easier to maintain, introducing fresh content to one area will have a positive impact on all areas of the business and so on.
It is common practice in the travel industry to start a new website to try and sell the same thing differently - but at the end of the day, you are doing no one any favors. The money you invest in building the new site would be better suited to developing the message and the marketing programme of the existing site and increasing its’ overall position in the search engines. It is interesting to see the likes of HostelWorld have recently let some of their regional domain names expire in the interest of pursuing their primary domain only.
Finally, I think it is important to think about this when buying domains. I see a lot of people buying domains because of the name of the domain thinking this will be the most important thing - sure it helps in part in the mystical search engine algorithm, but at the end of the day the real value is in the perceived authority of the website content itself and therefore it’s inbound links.
Tags: Domain names, SEO
May 2nd, 2008 at 6:56 pm
I currently run a multi lingual website which in effect sells the same thing in lots of different languages which are all hosted on one domain. The problem that I have found is that in each of the respective countries where the language is relevant, the Google rankings that I have optimised for have relatively poor results.
After some consultation I have come to realise that there is an arguement towards having a different URL for each language, and perhaps even localised hosting. The other option is of course straight redirects to the relevant page, but I have also heard on several occassions that Google prefers to have content attached to a URL rather than redirects.
At the moment I am at a cross roads. Any idea on which strategy would work best for a multilingual, multi url site?
May 4th, 2008 at 8:43 pm
I guess the first place to start is to look at all the different language keyword searches to that which you are optimising the sites for to determine that what the users are in fact searching for is what your sites are truly optimsed as. I guess you are not simply translating the sites word for word but rather rewriting the sites in the different language for your targeted keywords in that language. Things like image names, alt text and headings in the different languages will help as will recognition of the fact that search terms in different countries might be vastly different to searches that you are expecting in English.
There is also the argument that search engines take into account where your server is actually placed, so if you have a site in Australia about Australian stuff and the server is in the US then the site may not do so well in Australia. We don’t have any idea what sort of weighting this sort of thing has in the Google algorithm.
I did a bit of a quick research to see what other sites were doing. Sony has completely different URLs for each country, as did Air New Zealand, Apple on the other hand keeps the user in the .com and adds the language, Hostel World creates a sub domain for each language, Hertz rent a car made the translations dynamically, Crown Relocations don’t seem to offer any multi-languages at all from their .com site (and their .co.uk redirected to .com) and Avis rentals recognised I was in New Zealand based on my IP address and showed me a NZ specific site - I hate that!
Unless I am missing something very obvious the Avis site drives me crazy. The NZ specific site is all in English and does not have anywhere obvious for me to change languages - but what if I was a German tourist already in NZ wanting to rent a car! Apparently Lycos did this in the early days and one of the biggest outcrys was in Belgium where there are a disproportionate amount of international workers yet Lycos displayed every time in Flemish. Whatever strategy you choose make sure it is obvious to your users how to change languages, especially if you are going to default to their local site based on IP addresses.
I think if I was to build large sites that were multi-lingual and cross-border in operation I would be inclined to create whole new sites on regional URLs. It is one thing translating a tourism site where you are operating in a specific area although selling across multiple markets and how Google looks at those translations compared to a site such as yours where you are selling essentially a different product in each market - albeit the same service. Relocating from Portugal to New Zealand is a quite different product than relocating from Germany to England and I would think that Google is therefore treating the translated pages all as independent sites sort of - bad explanation, but I hope you know what I mean. I think from a search engine and user point of view it would be better if you created different sites for each operating area and rather than simply translating the original you completely rewrote the content to reflect the nuisances of the specific markets.