Handling a Global Presence
- 23rd Oct 2007
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- Internet Marketing
scenario :
You are a global company with offices around the world, how to handle global presence on a local level.
We know that having a co.uk on a UK IP address will boost your rankings in Google.co.uk or a .de domain on a German IP address will boost you in the German Serps in Google.de, but what if you are a global company and want local listings as well as global listings. In this scenario the central database is in the US. Now if you know about multi view DNS stop reading ;)
we are going to setup a few subdomains :
www.mydomain.com central core where all humans should end up
uk.mydomain.com UK core where all British humans should end up
de.mydomain.com German core where all German humans should end up
es.mydomain.com Spain core where all Spanish humans should end up
all the subdomains are on the same IP and hosted with the central Database, which isn’t ideal so
For the UK get the mydomain.co.uk hosted on UK IP address and install a Proxy to pull the data from the central server then conditionally redirect to the UK domain. Repeat and rinse with all the other sub domains. Because you are conditionally doing this you send a few humans and spiders to the locally hosted sites.
You can if you have good load balancing and decent servers 301 everyone to the local hosted site, but you can have issues with re sync databases, so far i have preferred the proxy pulling data method.
any better ideas I’m all ears, of course you need UK, DE and ES content :)
DaveN
11 Comments | Leave a comment »
I’ve been thinking about this very problem recently. It’s a toughie. I like that solution though - elegant, but hack-y at the same time :)
I think I need to read more about multi view DNS - that sounds intriguing….
That last sentence is the big trouble… I mean, if you want to rank locally in each south american country, how many spanish pages do you have to write??
For many of my setups, I use Coda Hales PEN Load Balancer and proxy off requests to a cluster of Mongrel servers. I’ve never before considered using this method to target certain SERPs.
Thanks!
Wonder if there’d be any issues with the conditional redirect - could it be mistaken for a cloak?
/goes to read about multi view dns/
But I do wonder - to what expent do you need localised versions?
Sure, in many cases you do because the business is actually different.
But in the case of a company which sells the same product around the world, say Tim Tams (no I will not send you any :-P buy your own).
(Presuming they do not in fact have localisable content - I haven’t actually looked into them, its just the first thing that popped into my head to which this example might apply.)
So, there is their .com, and they also want to rank on .au and .uk for local content (and it doesn’t need localisation because they are all English).
What if the sites were actually dupes?
Yes, we are betting on the engines picking the correct dupe for the gtld search, but when it comes to local search, there won’t be a dupe because only the local site wil be eligible.
I think it might work and one of these days I am going to find an excuse to actually test this!
10 * Stick with the cctld’s instead of using subdomains *
visitors are more inclined to visit sites with corresponding cctld’s. This is especialy the case with B2C sites.
20 * keep them all hosted one location *
Google will rank them perfectly if you have the cctld. An IP from that country *also* isn’t necessary. Save your client some money, he can spend it on some more consultancy ;)
30 goto 10
Have done this for several multinationals, with success.
I’m facing the same decision too.
I can see how Arturo’s suggestion of just making sure you register the ccTLD and then have the appropriate language (and HTML language encoding) would work well enough for Google et al to work it out. Regardless of where they are hosted.
What I’m wondering though is the following:
Would it matter if you were to register the ccTLD with a registrar with DNS servers in that specific countries, to then point it to the nameservers of your main server? Just wondering if this will add to the localization because DNS queries for that ccTLD specific domain will show a traceroute via that country at least.
Secondly, in Google Holland, Germany etc. they have 3 radio buttons under the search box. 1. Search the whole web, 2. Search in [Language] and 3. Search pages physically from [Country] - What I’m wondering is which option is used most in those countries. 1 or 2 won’t have any bad effect on the ‘host them on one server no matter where’ scenario. Option 3 obviously does. Knowing mankind and their lazy nature, I’m guessing option 1. I’m also guessing Google will still favour localized content, by the searcher’s IP and language of the query, so even if they don’t pick option 2 or 3, Google still does it for them, ever so slightly at least. However, that’s just my guess.
Any thoughts on these two points? Would you register the domain with a registrar in that country? And do you know whether Google makes localization decisions on the searcher’s behalf automatically?
Johan, Google works like this:
If the domain has a generic TLD (.com, .org, etc), the actual server must be hosted in that specific country. -or- The domain has to have a matching ccTLD and can be hosted anywhere. It doesn’t matter where the DNS servers are located.
Side note: people aren’t that lazy. In Spain approximately 12% use option no.3 - Search pages physically from [Country].
Good luck with the decision, it’s an important one :) Better to have it right the first time then to have to change it later on.
I have never thought outside of my local search, do you have to translate the pages to the language of the local search in order for keywords to show up. Would you have to hire writers to write enough content in the target language, or did you just look around the office and say he speaks this and she speaks that?
Thanks Arturo. Interesting, that 12% stat.
I’ve got the ccTLDs via UK registrars and I’ve got my UK hosted server. I’ve got the translations going too. So I’m going your route. Host all sites centrally (in UK). Fingers crossed the ccTLD + translations (not actual 1:1 translations but with added localization and geographical targeting) + relevant country links + proper document language encoding will do the trick.
Speaking of ‘relevant country links’, how important do you guys reckon this is for the sake of ranking in that country’s specific search engine? Would it matter in your opinion whether the first big link I got to mysite.de is from a UK based English site or a UK based German site or a Germany based German site?
Cheers
Dave, if you’re setting up subdomains, isn’t it possible to assign these to different IPs?