Hello all.. We have an idea about good product in Europe but I'd like to ask you for help. We are in preparation for new website, let's say www.mywebsite.com and we'd like to open it for 15 European markets - content will be the same but in national language and we'll try to optimize for each specific market. Domain name will be in English (mywebsite) and we also bought domain names, where possible, all the time with English name and the end is typical for every market (mywebsite.ru, mywebsite.de, mywebsite.it ...). This way we'd like to build one mark for all markets (MyWebsite), we'd like to be as close to people specifics as possible. We have country cooperators in each country prepared for it. We need to know... We'd like to build one mark (same for all markets) but URLs will be different (at the end - .it, .pl, .de). Our idea is to redirect Italian visitor from mywebsite.it to mywebsite.com/it all the time and redirect Polish visitor from mywebsite.pl to mywebsite.com/pl. What do you think about this and how we will build links and everything on local markets? We will build links in Italy to mywebsite.com/it or we will ask webmasters to link to us to mywebsite.it and after this 301 redirect will bring them to us. Will these links bring us some "google points" (to mywebsite.com/it URL)? How google in Italy will index our website, as mywebsite.com/it or mywebsite.it? In this case it is possible that we will be on 1st place for "my website" phrase in Italy? The idea about so many language versions on one domain is because this way we'd like to build strong traffic on one website, which we can report, check, show... This way we'll be big player, in case of existence 15 separate domain names, our power will be not so big. Thank you for your time and I will wait for usefull tips.
You can do that yes, but when you do linkbuilding for a local domain, you do linkbuilding directly to the e.g. blabla.com/pl and not to the blabla.pl The .com/it will be indexed. Or better explained: Where the real content is stored, that's the place and stuff that will be indexed. A redirect url will never be indexed because they do not contain content itself. So your balbla.pl and blabla.de urls etc. are only nice looking for on brochures and so fort but online you use the .com/de and the others
Hi rruben, OK, thank you for info. And what if some webmaster will use url mydomain.it not mydomain.com/it - this will have no value for me?
This should pass value when you do a permanent redirect. But in most cases you don't have to worry about that. Webmasters are in the most cases smart enough to copy the link out of the url box in the browser, which means that they will always take the good one. And when you notice that one of them use the wrong url, you can mail that person and ask politely that your website is moved to the "new location" and that you recommend that person to change the url.
Given that a country-specific domain name can not only help you rank better in the geo-political local searches but can also prevent possible competitors from acquiring the domain, why do you want to just build the specific language versions onto one site? Just provide a menu bar at the top of your pages and let people choose the language they want to read - then take them to the country-specific version they want and be done with it.