[Prestashop blog Link] SEO Expert Series, Rand Fiskin

[Dh42]

Great article with tips on SEO for e-commerce sites. http://www.prestashop.com/blog/en/seo-expert-series-rand-fishkin-of-moz/

[El Patron]

I would love to see SEO experts inform community about using ccTLDs to target by country.  PrestaShop makes it easy with MultiShop.

 

(note tried to post as comment but flagged as spammer)

 

Leslie, maybe you could create article on your wonderful blog.

[Dh42]

My personal view on it is that it is easy to spam and hard to do with Prestashop. The default template of Prestashop only mildly has support for targeting other languages. It doesn't support hreflang, which is recommended, https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en   From everything I have read, the current implementation of how prestashop uses the lang tag is not the perferred method and hasn't been for a couple of years. 

 

 

Also one thing I think most people do not consider is the translation. They translate hteir site with google translate and see it as done. Google has come out and said if you do that, they will consider it spam. 

 

But the idea of using different cctld's works very well for seo. Matt Cutts explains it best, he is the head of search engine spam at google, 

 Notice the part at the end he says about auto translated text, they control the translator so they know what has been translated. 

[Trip]

The Matt Cutts statement is about 3 years old. Afaik google recommends now using hreflang and

I will go with hreflang. It is relatively easy to modify the language block module to get the links.

This statement is really interesting

 

 

It's a good idea to provide a generic URL for geographically unspecified users if you have several alternate URLs targeted at users with the same language, but in different locales.

 

If you sell in one country ccTLD's might be ok but com Domains are relativly strong imo. If I have an international business and sell worldwide I think the overhead is to much to maintain I don't know 10 or whatever multishops.

 

I was playing with the idea first too but I for example I couldn't get a com.au domain without having a registered business in autralia.

I also think from a customer view it is clearer when they see a com domain with lots of localised content that they are ordering on an international website. 

How would you feel when you see a shopsite in german/spanish or whatever with a ccTLD and at the end of the checkout you are realising that the shop is located in China?

Last but not least you have to build authority for all your domains instead of focusing on one.

 

What I want to say ccTLD's might be an option and are a must have if you have warehouses in the targeted countries but I would decide that from case to case.

 

I came to the conclusion that it is not an option for my international business.

All the best, Trip

[El Patron]

thanks for input trip, re. ccTLD, I've set up a few shops for customers using a ccTLD  stragety, they love to see in search results their products on different domains.

 

.com is for all intentional purposes, US but if one wants to assume it's global gTLD, then why would one want to compete for German customers at a .com level rather than simply adding a .de or de.yourdomain sub?

 

another significant advantage of using ccTLD, for those that use adwords, is that you bidding on keywords by country is much cheaper than competing at gTLD level.

 

as for managing a multiple ccTLD's of 'one content', there is no issue, simple to set up in ps 1.5++t

 

his is by far the most significant  way to increase seo in the countries you do business in.  (in my honest opinion.)
 

[Trip]

Dear El Patron,

if you have the resources and only target limited countries it is possilbe the best option to use ccTLD's (besides you are a mayour company like amazon, ebay etc.pp). 

I guess 

 

 

.com is for all intentional purposes

you meant "international"? That it basically what I mean. When I sell international I would prefer a *.com domain.

I have a shop with a com domain and with most keywords I outrank my *.de competitors in germany. I guess the server ip has some weight to.

So my next step will seperate language versions of the site like de de-de de-ch de-au, en-au,en-us and so on. This is really done in minutes and I was quite impressed how easy PS does the job.

So I must admit I am not up2date with the multishop feature. I was one of the unwilling "beta"-testers with a couple of really annoying bug reports that I simply gave up on that. I have a running business and from my experience at least if you have shared products stocks it is irriversible when you once setup a multistore. So if that fails  I am boned

Besided that my staff is not so skilled and I like to keep things simple

 

 

 

as for managing a multiple ccTLD's of 'one content', there is no issue, simple to set up in ps 1.5++t

 

but this is only possible in multistore mode isn't it?

 

So as I have a international shop with a *.com domain and a shop in germany with a .de domain I can tell you from experience the international shop has 4 times more visitors from germany than the ccTLD shop although we are selling the same products. That is simply because the com domain is older, has more authority, content is more often updated, more backlinks and so on.

 

I second your opinion when for example I have a shop in the uk and want to sell in france too. Then ccTLD is the way to go.

But I want to sell wordwide with a focus an ger, us, at. ch, au, nz, ca maybe fr and uk. How would you do that? I can't get a com.au domain - first blocker. In germany I am already ranking very good. So setup a de domain with the risk to drop in serps? No way. Which domain do I use for us market? The real drawback of many domains I mentioned already. They can not inherit domain authority so I you have a worthy backlink on one domain much of the "juice" gets lost.

 

So as said, I will go with the "Subdirectories with gTLDs" approach because it it cheap, easy to maintain. Even google uses hreflang on there pages. So I think it can not be that wrong.

Anyway, don't get me wrong. I apprechiate your input too and it is always interesting to get interersting insigths.

 

So maybe someone can give me an opinion on an issue where I found no answer?

By default PS puts category name into the product url. I am really asking myself if this is best practice.

I know the url pattern could be changed easily but maybe some of the seo experts could enlighten me?

(Sorry for of topic )

All the best, Trip

[El Patron]

.com is more considered a US.  For example if I use .com and .us then I could have duplicate content.

 

remember al gore invented the internet..jajajaja

 

yes, domain names the older the better, that is why it's good idea to start ccTLDing asap.

 

the only issue when ccTLD, is some countries (nl/it) for example require two IP's, my hosting does not allow me to even 'buy' more IP's though they will 'gladly' sell me the domain names...ave maris pues (omg in ColOmbia).

 

using one gTLD and mulitple ccTLD's is doing just what google tells us is best practice, I certainly didn't invent it and ps did a lovely job giving us capability to obtain ture localizaton, mean if I have one shop with German in .com and create .de, the Germain visitor is going to be more pleased  with .de (localized) then .com or say .eu (regional).

 

as for off-topic, not I can not help much there....personally other than implementing changes in ps to support what google tells us to do, I'd look outside this forum.

 

btw: trip thanks for sharing your experience in the community.

[Dh42]

I think using ccTLD's is still relevant and a lot of the SEO community thinks it is as well. Matt Cutts' views are usually solid until he makes a statement changing them. Using the hreflang is also important too, that is what I mentioned that Prestashop does not use correctly for country utilization. It relies on the old lang tag. 

 

 

As for Al Gore inventing the internet, I am not a fan of his, but he actually really helped it out in my area. I have been getting 100mb+ for a few years now because when he was our senator he made the utility companies run fiber throughout the state. So once the broadband came online ours was one of the fastest in the country. 

 

 

Trip, as for your thought about putting the category name in the product url, I do not see any issue with it. It provides a better user experience in the form of an url. One thing it also promotes too is having google site links as well. I am on a chromebook so my screenshotting utilities are not the best, so I will describe them. If you google the phrase"tiger direct" you can see how their categories are presented in the search. Having urls with no category in the structure hurts that. 

[Trip]

Thank you for you input guys. I thing I will test my approach first as it is most easy to accomplish.

If it will not have the desired effect I can still test a ccTLD approach beside that. Guess I must checkout the multistore

feature once again than. Maybe it makes a more solid impression this time?!

 

Well I think I remember someone in the forum said that shorter url's might rank better but when I asked for further details I  got no response. I am quite positive that keyword stuffed category names are contra productive and the urls of some of my competitors (and some of mine) really don't look good.

With SEO nowadays it's kinda voodoo hoodoo.

I ranked with one of my desired keyword somewhere on page two in google serps and than I decided to make one category page with this keyword to improve ranking. Result was I totally dropped out of serps with that keywords. Maybe it was to obvious what I wanted to achieve? We will never know. At least I am pleased that spammy exact keyword match domains are now dropping in serps. That was to annoying seeing pages popping up with poor content and you could not compete against them.

 

All the best, Trip

[Trip]

Ok this is an interview from Matt from 2008 but I also found some older resoureces that say that longer urls have much lower click through rates.

 

Matt said 

 

 

Matt Cutts: Certainly. If you can make your title four- or five-words long – and it is pretty natural. If you have got a three, four or five words in your URL, that can be perfectly normal. As it gets a little longer, then it starts to look a little worse. Now, our algorithms typically will just weight those words less and just not give you as much credit.

can be found here http://www.stephanspencer.com/matt-cutts-interview/

Maybe I will shorten some of my category names

 

All the best, Trip

[Trip]

Well for the ones still interested in the topic.

I implemented hreflang tag 3 weeks ago and now I have an extra tab in google webmaster tool which would translate something like 

"international orientation".

I got error messages for missing backlinks and that the error about wrong language codes e.g. "en-en".

As google seems to give much importance to this (hreflang) I think this should become standard in PS.

All the best, Trip

[El Patron]

Well for the ones still interested in the topic.

I implemented hreflang tag 3 weeks ago and now I have an extra tab in google webmaster tool which would translate something like 

"international orientation".

I got error messages for missing backlinks and that the error about wrong language codes e.g. "en-en".

As google seems to give much importance to this (hreflang) I think this should become standard in PS.

All the best, Trip

 

Hey trip, thanks as always for sharing, possible you could open a feature request here: http://forge.prestashop.com

 

I finished working on IETF language detection module to extend ps basic detection.  It's a very interesting area, i.e. localization.  What I noticed sites like MS use the IETF as part of their url, where we are with /en/ not /en-uk/.  That for another day.

 

so I am curious as to backlinks error you mentioned, is it because back link /en/ and not /en-en/?

[Trip]

Hi El Patron,

I am slightly in Holliday Mode at the moment. I think I made a couple of feature requests and I am not sure if hreflang was one or not

What I can say at the moment is, I am testing it with en-au to target australian customers as I have very few visitors there. Might be interesting how this evolves over a couple of months. After one week google has only indexed a handfull of urls (at least thats what gwt tells me) so I am curious how this will go on. I guess it will take a couple of months to see some results but at least I will be able to tell if this approach might be a cheaper alternative to the ccTLD Domain approach.

All the best, Trip