Hi, cool forum - learning lots today but I think my brain is full... I'm starting a new business and setting up my new website(s). Here's my situation: "www.mysite.ca" with Canadian content, and "www.mysite.com" with U.S. content. One company, so the content will obviously by very similar, but I do want to maintain separate visitor environments (.ca vs. com in browser, currency of prices, spellings, etc.) and some of the product sample images will be different. My .com is registered and hosted with a U.S. firm I'm happy with, but they don't do .ca, so I registered my .ca with a Canadian firm and changed the DNS to point to the .com host. I know I can add-on the .ca to "www.mysite.com/canada" and then maintain two completely independent sites. Will this look like duplicate sites and make the SEs (Google etc.) unhappy? I know I can park the .ca (or 301 redirect it) to the .com, but then the two domains will have exactly the same content. I gather I can make it all dynamic and build pages according to which domain the viewer came in on, but, aside from the time and effort to do so (which is not appealing at this point - I'm pretty new to this stuff) aren't dynamic pages also less likely than static ones to be ranked well by the SEs? And would that still look like duplicate content? By the way, I found a test page a while ago and it said my .ca status was something like "200 - OK" - should that have said "301 something" instead? If so, how do I fix that? (I forwarded it by using the control panel option with my .ca registrar - should I see about doing that htaccess thing there instead? There is currently no such file at my default site on my .ca registrar's server.) Sorry to barge in here and ask so much, but I need to get to work on my site(s) and operating my business ASAP and I'm spending a lot of time learning all this domain stuff instead. Any help would be hugely appreciated! Thanks much, Rick
I am sure someone will come in here and move this as it is not in the right place, but that is not that big of a deal. As for the sites, you seem to have a grasp on the issues at hand. Running two sites is double the work regardless of all of the site admin shortcuts you can take (ie: includes, etc). I am not sure what is really going to be that different between the Canadian and US versions of the site...maybe you can touch on that a bit more so we can help make a decision on what is best for you. If the content is going to be the same, then I would just do one site and pick one of the two domain names you have and 301 to the other...if you even want to do that. There is really no benefit, when it comes to the SEs to have multiple domain names pointing to the same place if they are both new (ie: no links pointing to them). So, if they are both new, then just use one, unless you think you will get a better response from your CA customers when they see a .ca at the end...and vice versa. As for the dynamic vs. static question, there is no difference when it comes to the SEs ranking the pages. Sometimes bots have a tough time with crazy urls, so you may want to read up on rewriting urls using ModRewrite. But, just ask around here, there are plenty of knowledgeable people who are willing to help on DP. <edit>Oh yeah, and welcome to DP </edit>
Thanks, Chachi, and if anyone can tell me how to move this post and where to, I will. Or at least copy it, if that helps. The main purpose of portraying the image of distinct sites has to do with marketing and product acceptance than with SE ranking, but I'd still like to avoid SE spankings at the same time if I can. My business is more traditional than web-based but I intend to maximize the potential of the web for brand recognition etc. Some of my prospects are institutions that are under pressure to buy as locally as possible. Plus, there are prospects who just feel more comfortable buying from a company with a genuine presence in their own country. I'm in Ontario and am affiliated with a BC company, so I'm building the Canadian business first. But I have contacts in five U.S. states who will get involved soon and support the U.S. presence of the company. So after that's in place I'd like to have the U.S. version of the site list the U.S. offices and contacts. And I'll probably put a prominent button for clicking over to the Canadian site from there in case a Canadian prospect lands there, and vice versa. (Google.ca's "pages from Canada" button is a joke - it filters maybe 5% of the U.S. and other national sites from the search results.) Thinking more about this, I suppose it's better SE-wise to only having one site collecting all the traffic rather than two sites splitting the traffic, and that might make up for any losses from getting fancy with country-determining scripts and dynamic pages and/or URLs. I hope. Any thoughts? One silly question: With SSI, do the spiders see the final page with the inclusions the same way they'd see it if it were static? My hunch says yes, but I'm a newbie. I'd like to eliminate duplicating the button bars & stuff for new pages but don't want that to reduce their SE appeal. Thanks! Rick
Yes, as the name implies (Server Side Includes), all of the magic takes place on the web server before anyone or anything gets to see the requested page. IMHO, I think one site is probably a better way to go. Less work is always better.
Hi Oak Aged I don't envy you this problem as it can be a bit sticky. I have had a similar decision to make in the past with .com and .co.uk domains and we went with splitting them into two separate sites. The decision was basically forced by the need to present a wholly US focussed environment to one set of visitors and a wholly UK focussed environment to another. We wanted the UK site to appear to UK visitors as a standalone UK focussed operation so we decided that rather than www.widgets.com/uk/index.html or whatever we prefered the uk visitors to go to www.widgets.co.uk and for that domain to stay in their browser. We opted for 2 entirely separate sites. There may have been other ways to do this. The problem is that if you leave the domain name in the browser as widgets.co.uk (or .ca in your case) but point it at the same content then you have 2 urls (on separate domains) with the same content. If you set up a 301 redirect then the user is taken from widgets.co.uk and moved to widgets.com and the url in the browser will change (which we didn't want). The answer we went for was to preserve the uk domain name and develop separate, interlinked sites. This is a lot more effort but there are pluses. It forces you to develop content that is focussed to each country and set of visitors which can help with being seen as someone the visitor wants to do business with. You can get the .ca domain listed in canadian directories etc. and the .com one can be listed in the main .com versions. You may attract more canadian links. You may find your canadian site more relevant in Canadian searches (particularly if you have a canadian host). The problem is, as already stated, there is more work. That being said there are many international businesses that have .co.uk .com .ca and various other international domains that don't redirect, serve very similar content and rank. This is a very reasonable business decision (to have slightly different content on the relevant TLD for different English speaking markets) and isn't something the Search Engines are likely to try to penalise. You just have to avoid getting caught in the crossfire. Google at least, usually seems to pick one of our domains to show as relevant in .com results (rarely more than one and usually the .com site) and another to show as relevant in the country SEs. I wouldn't like to say that one approach is better than the other. We managed to develop substantially different sites for different markets over time and they all rank in the relevant country level search engines. But it is a lot more work because you are developing separate content and running separate marketing, link building, seo campaigns for each. In the long run it has definitely worked for us and if you want Canadian customers you may end up doing these things anyway. If you can't develop distinct content for .ca vs .com then perhaps you would be better to stay with all of it on one domain. You should note that either way you will probably end up with different urls and similar content (it's just that it's all on one site and perhaps that is less likely to be penalised). You might be able to avoid this by detecting the users country by IP address but I have no idea what difficulties that could entail. You could also just list US and Canadian pricing and delivery options and both contact addresses on one page if that is the only difference. Anyway, I thought it would be worthwhile to give you some of the pros and cons of another approach. Hope it helps. Alastair
Thanks for the great info, Alastair! The way I have it set up right now, I used the .ca registrar's control panel to point my .ca domain at the .com host's server IPs, and then used the .com hosts's parking feature. In testing, both URLs returns the 200 "OK" code, and both go to the same site, and keep the original extension (.ca or .com). But I've been learning more about how the SEs work, and adding to that your input, I think the best way to go is to get a Canadian host for the .ca site and go with two fully independent sites. The text can be reworded to say essentially the same thing but not look like a duplicate to a spider, I think. So here's how it looks to me now: One site: Pro = one site to administer; traffic from both domains adds together. Con = have to use scripts to determine what to display; won't look Canadian in the SERPs. Two sites: Pro = no chance of error (getting the country wrong); proper country-specific SERPs; easier marketing & back link management. Con = two sites to administer (but in my case that's not too bad); cost of second host (which should more than pay for itself). Hopefully this will also help other readers pondering a similar situation. Thanks everyone for your help! Rick