How to use international internet domains (.it, .co.uk, .es, ...) to the best for SEO

Question

I have developed a web application in English - you can reach it, say, at www.example.com.

Then, I made the Italian localisation. Basically if you go to www.example.com with an "Italian" browser, the language is automatically switched to Italian.

I have bought also the domain example.it. If you go to:
http://www.example.it
you are automatically redirected to
http://www.example.com/it/
where you can read the website in Italian.

Now I am doing some PR in Italy writing guest blog articles in Italian.

My question is: in order to benefit the most from SEO, should I link www.example.it or www.example.com from those articles in Italian?

Links to authoritative sources will be very much appreciated.

Thanks,
Dan

Answer 1

If you have already Page Rank on your domain http://www.example.com you should definitly use http://www.example.com/it/ or a subdomain solution.

In case you use your domain http://www.example.it Search Engine will consider this as a new domain so you won't benefit of the PR from your domain .com.

Another approach could be using subdomains. Example: it.example.com.

I also suggest you to use Google Web Master Tools for GeoTargeting so you could better rank on the Italian SERP (it works pretty well with subdomains)

Here some useful resource to start with:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=62399

http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/folders-vs-subdomains-vs-cctld-in-international-seo-an-overview

Let me know if you have any questions, I hope I helped you.

Answer 2

If you use a 301 "Moved Permanently" redirect from example.it to example.com/it it should give your example.com domain almost as much benefit as if you had linked to it directly.

SEOmoz:

A 301 Redirect is a permanent redirect which passes between 90-99% of link juice (ranking power) to the redirected page.

SEO Blog:

According to Matt Cutts “you only lose a tiny bit of SEO value whenever you use a 301 permanent redirect”

The small loss that both sources mention, is probably related to speed: Search engines prefer fast pages, and a redirect results in slightly slower page loads (see Yahoo Performance Best Practices).

So, the extra redirect likely seems to produce a tiny disadvantage. However, there is so much guessing when it comes to SEO, I wouldn't care too much.

But as your example.it domain is never going to show up as a search result anyway (because of the redirect, only example.com/it will be indexed), you can just as well link directly to the .com version, to be on the safe (and fast) side.

To wrap it up:

• people will not see the example.it domain anyway, except they look at the status bar while they hover the link
• it is slightly better and faster to link directly to the target of your redirect, example.com/it
• just use your simpler example.it domain for cases where people actually type your URL