International SEO

[Oceanic]

If you mark-up your different language pages with Ahreflang tags in the pages or XML sitemap you should have no issue: https://moz.com/learn/seo/hreflang-tag

Also, Google is clever enough to detect the difference in language and won't treat it as dupe content.

So, unless there is a dev-ops reason, I strongly avoid sub-domains.

 

[dee]

Okay... another question please. Lets say I move the site over to the com and use domain/fr or fr.domain . Then 301 from origial country domain.

1/ If I redirect a specific url to the new page. Is that something you can do from a different domain in ht access ?

so... if the french site was domain.fr/specific_page.html

and the new one is domain.com/fr/specific_page.html

Do you 301 the whole domain , so domain.fr > 301 > domain.com and then the specific pages within that in ht access ? Trying to get my head around it. Ive done it with old content on same domain but not cross domain extension

 

[dog]

You just need to host the old domain and configure the .htaccess properly. If you are concerned with specific URLs.

You don't want to do it with too many specific links though. The server load can become heavy on redirects depending on how large the site is.

 

[Oceanic]

If you mark-up your different language pages with Ahreflang tags in the pages or XML sitemap you should have no issue: https://moz.com/learn/seo/hreflang-tag

Also, Google is clever enough to detect the difference in language and won't treat it as dupe content.

So, unless there is a dev-ops reason, I strongly avoid sub-domains.

Okay... another question please. Lets say I move the site over to the com and use domain/fr or fr.domain . Then 301 from origial country domain.

1/ If I redirect a specific url to the new page. Is that something you can do from a different domain in ht access ?

so... if the french site was domain.fr/specific_page.html

and the new one is domain.com/fr/specific_page.html

Do you 301 the whole domain , so domain.fr > 301 > domain.com and then the specific pages within that in ht access ? Trying to get my head around it. Ive done it with old content on same domain but not cross domain extension

Ideally you should map pages like for like, this can be a lot of work if the site is large, so you may need to prioritise:-

By backlinks
By traffic
By rankings

Etc etc.


But the more granular you can make the redirect mapping between legacy and new URLs the better preservation of rankings you will achieve.

 

[dee]

You just need to host the old domain and configure the .htaccess properly.

Thank you ! Thats the bit I didnt get. You do the redirect on old domain. Makes sense. Couldnt see how you would map ON the new domain.

Ideally you should map pages like for like, this can be a lot of work if the site is large, so you may need to prioritise:-

By backlinks
By traffic
By rankings

Etc etc.

I would try and keep the url structure the same really in new site and just be meticulous. Priorotise in terms of business from country