What is the best domain structure for multiple markets?
Hey guys, so we're looking at laying the foundation for US and other markets in 2021.. would you know what's best practice for domains?
We see Tripadvisor and Houzz have .com, .com.au, .co.uk etc. for their various markets.. while Canva just have .com.
Do we canonicalise .com and .com.au? Does Google automatically rank .com.au for Google Australia and .com for Google USA? Should we just redirect to a gTLD and forget about subdomains/folders/ccTLDs?
Will do some more research but would appreciate any insights you have!
Update: Found a decent overview here: https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2018/01/30/how-to-find-the-perfect-domain-strategy-for-international-seo/
One method we're strongly considering is just redirecting to the gTLD (savvysme.com) and on pages that need to be location specific (e.g. accounting page for US will be different to AU), we'll use cookies to identify where they are and dynamically change the feed to show location specific content.
A SEMrush article says this: "You definitely don't want to use cookies or JavaScript to show different country or language-specific versions of your website on the same URL. This will possibly prevent all site versions but one to get crawled and indexed in the search engines, so make sure to stay away from that."
Source: https://www.semrush.com/blog/an-in-depth-look-at-international-seo/
What are your thoughts?
