sell to other countries

['Woger]

Hi there,

I want to sell to other countries besides my own. I use at the moment a .nl domain and an alias .be domain. Now I want to add britain and germany. I have also a .eu domain. What is best practice now to be findable in those other countries. Should I migrate from .nl to .eu so I can use webmaster tools to add countries or use sudirs and hope google connect these to other countries or buy also .co.uk and .de domains?

 

Thanks,

Roger

[El Patron]

Hi Roger,

 

Don't migrage .nl (ccTLD) 'country code' to .eu (rTLD). regional, you will lose your exising .nl juice.

 

The key is one can have many ccTLD's, .fr/.de/.uk etc but only one(1) gTLD and/or rTLD

 

until PrestaShop supports full ietf language code in url, i.e. /en/  --> /en-us|en-gb/ we are stuck with using ccTLD's  to multiplex  content without duplicate content penalties.

 

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1347922?hl=en

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en

['Woger]

Hmm.. It seems almost impossible to be findable in other countries. The only option I found is by using the sitemaps (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2620865?hl=en)

However this is done by the Prestashop module and if I make these changes to the sitemap they will be overwritten as soon as the module updates.

['Woger]

OK,

 

I added this to the main sitemap:

<sitemap><loc>http://chinarello.nl/urls_sitemap.xml</loc>

<lastmod>2015-02-12T21:21:31+01:00</lastmod></sitemap>

 

in the urls_sitemap.xml i added:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"

  xmlns:xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

  <url>

    <loc>http://chinarello.nl/nl/</loc>

    <xhtml:link

                 rel="alternate"

                 hreflang="nl-be"

                 href="http://chinarello.nl/nl/"

                 />

    <xhtml:link

                 rel="alternate"

                 hreflang="en-gb"

                 href="http://chinarello.nl/gb/"

                 />

    <xhtml:link

                 rel="alternate"

                 hreflang="nl-nl"

                 href="http://chinarello/nl/"

                 />

  </url>

 

  <url>

    <loc>http://chinarello.nl/gb/</loc>

    <xhtml:link

                 rel="alternate"

                 hreflang="nl-nl"

                 href="http://chinarello.nl/nl/"

                 />

     <xhtml:link

                 rel="alternate"

                 hreflang="nl-be"

                 href="http://chinarello.nl/nl/"

                 />

     <xhtml:link

                 rel="alternate"

                 hreflang="en-gb"

                 href="http://chinarello.nl/gb/"

                 />

  </url>

</urlset>

 

The main idea is to point belgian users (nl-be) and dutch users (nl-nl) to the /nl/ subdir and british users (en-gb) to the /gb/ subdir. I tested it with google and it didn't complain. Now see what happens.

 

Thanks,

 

Roger