Domain strategy for uk based .com going international

[Christine R]

Hi everyone,

This is my first post on searchenginewatch, so I hope I'm posting this question in the right forum. Apologies if I've chosen the wrong one.


I currently work for a site based in the UK, for UK consumers. The domain is a .com. We are close to expanding internationally, first of all into the US. As we have already marketed and built up a successful business using our .com domain for our UK market, we can't go down the route of having a .co.uk for the UK and a .com for the US. This leaves two options, either to use 1. subdomains (us.yourdomain.com) or 2. subfolders (yourdomain.com/us).

From posts I've read on other threads to do with expanding into european countries, having a ccTLD and being hosted in the country in question are both important factors when optimising for a particular country. From what I know .us domain isn't really used which is why I've come down to the two options above. Is the hosting an important factor? If so that would limit it to the subdomain option. Unless there's something you can do with subfolders to host them in different locations?

Are they any other factors, besides the points I've outlined above, that I should be taking into consideration. I would really appreciate any help with this decision. Thank you.

 

[Kubel]

The physical location of a server plays a more important role when it comes to latency than speed. You could probably host in the UK and maintain web sites for the various countries you plan on expanding into without any major issues. It doesn't have as great of an impact on web hosting quality of service as it would gaming servers or other latency-sensitive applications. So you might save resources keeping it centralized.

But if you want to use two servers with one domain, you can probably just try adding an A (address) DNS record for your US subdomain pointing to the IP of your US-based server, and then set us.yoursite.com as a virtual host on your US-based server.

The obvious drawback here is that search engines will see links to the different subdomains as different sites. If you used subdirectories instead, your links to those subdirectories would be considered internal by the search engine. You could probably do this by using an url rewrite engine (mod_rewrite for apache). So us.yoursite.com/ becomes yoursite.com/us/.