The Best URLs for International Websites

Although a page’s URL is less important to search engine algorithms than the page’s title, meta description, and content, it can still tell a search engine (as well as the person using it) a lot about the page’s relevance to a search query.

This is especially true of pages that target users all over the world. These pages often need to optimize their sitemaps for search engines in multiple languages. They can accomplish this by localizing not only their content, but also their URLs. The Wikimedia Foundation, for instance, is headquartered in the United States. However, its flagship project, Wikipedia, operates in nearly 300 languages.

While few international websites need to tailor their URLs to many languages (or regions), many of them can still benefit from adopting the URL structures of websites with a global userbase like Wikipedia. Here’s how:

Subdomains

A subdomain is a type of domain prefix that is added to the front of your domain name. It is often used by webmasters to simplify a website’s hierarchy. In the case of Wikipedia, the subdomain en.wikipedia.org separates the site’s English-language version from other language versions. Subdomains can be helpful for large sites that require multiple servers.

Subfolders

A subfolder is a type of domain suffix that is added to the end of your domain name. An example of this can be seen at https://www.ups.com/us/en/Home.page and https://es-us.ups.com/us/es/Home.page. Much like Wikipedia’s subdomains, these two similarly-structured subfolders differentiate alternate language versions from one another. However, they are both targeting customers in the United States.

Subfolders are highly recommended by Search Engine Optimization (SEO) experts for international websites because, unlike subdomains, they inherit the parent URL’s domain authority. This prevents a webmaster from having to spend even time and money rebuilding the site’s SEO for an international version. That being said, neither subdomains nor subfolders automatically geotarget a site’s content like ccTLDs do.

ccTLD

ccTLD is short for country code top-level domain. These domains are designed to represent particular countries on the World Wide Web. ccTLDs are best for websites that target users from only one country. A notable example of this can be seen at bbc.co.uk/news. Unlike the international version — which is located at bbc.com/news — the UK version of the site features news articles about England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland on its front page.

Originally published at https://manojbasnyat.net.