So my company wants to have a website on domain.de, domain.nl, domain.fr and domain.es. How does this work? Do we need a site plan for every single domain?
Also for another company we have domain.org (.com and eu are already taken) but also domain.nl and domain.de. We need to have a website for France, Germany, Netherlands and Spain. What would you advise? Also what’s best for SEO? I’m planning on using domain.org and then domain.org/de, domain.org/nl etc. OR domain.de (because our main targetgroup is in Germany) and then domain.de/fr, domain.de/nl etc.
It depends on what you want to achieve. If you have multiple domain (domain.[de, fr,es…]) pointing to the same Webflow website, you will have the same content on different domain → You will risk content duplication penalties from Google
In general, the subfolder options are best for SEO, but it all depends on your goals.
Going for the last option - domain.de/[fr, es] might be confusing for user and you won’t be able to use geotargetting.
Here is the answer from John Mueller (from Google search console) talking about if domain extension is globally available:
"Mueller says:
“The answer is yes. While a country code domain name helps our systems to geotarget for that country, it still allows for global visibility.
The only limitation is that you can’t specify other countries for geotargeting. For example, if you have a .fr website for France, you could use that globally. But you wouldn’t be able to geotarget users in Brazil explicitly."
does that mean if I’m using Webflows localization feature (which relies on the subfolder approach) and have two domains abc.de (primary) and abc.com the best solution is to use abc.de/en as the english homepage. Then I just setup a 301 – permanent redirect on the abc.com which leads to the abc.de/en site? Is that good practice or is there a better way?
@ianm it depends on your goals and and whether you’re building a new site, or merging existing sites ( which requires some SEO strategy to mitigate path conflicts ). .
In general your approach ( homepage redirect only ) should work well enough for a new site.
If you really want distinct domains and localization consistency you can go further with that by building two reverse proxies;
One for the base domain locale, in your case abc.de;
scrubs the sitemap to the primary locale only
scrubs link alt hreflangs, or updates them
redirects alt-locale paths to the correct alt locale domain
And one for each localized domain, in your case abc.com;
scrubs the sitemap to the alt locale only
scrubs link alt hreflangs, or updates them
rewrites requests so that requests to abc.com/* will rewrite content from abc.de/en/*
This effectively gives you two fully-functional separate sites, with the locale split by domain.
Like @memetican said, it depends on your future goals and strategy.
In the future, do you want to optimize for the .com or the .de domain?
How do you see the business scale in the future? Will it stay with German roots or not.
I think your challenge is more about user experience than technical SEO (@memetican already explained how to solve it).
If I were you, I will consider the 2 options (.de and .com) and 2 horizons (short term, long term) and then decide based on some criteria (SEO impact, user experience, challenge of implementation…)
Once you decide, commit and implement one of the solutions above.
You won’t have a perfect solution, just one you are more comfortable with. This is the joy of SEO.