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Localized sites dilemma

by Hauberk
3 replies
  • SEO
    • |
Hello fellow warriors ,

I'm looking for advice regarding our website localization. Our primary site/domain is in English language just as our primary market (the US, we are a software company). A few years ago we invested in localized versions of our site in German, Spanish, French, Italian and Brazilian Portuguese. Each site uses its own country domain.

Now the content on those sites is outdated and it has to be to re-written (translated) from scratch. This distracts us from our main job. The localized sites have very little traffic on them and we don't have much time to promote them either. We are currently focused on our English site and there is a lot to do on it.

So I decided that we keep German and Spanish sites only and close French, Italian and Brazilian, since doesn't make sense for us to support them anymore. The cost of keeping the sites, both money and time , is higher that we can hope to gain on those markets.

My question is - what would be the best way to set up forwards/redirects? Should we redirect each page on the sites being closed to the corresponding English page, or just create a site wide redirect and forward all traffic from those sites to our English home page?

Many thanks in advance.
#dilemma #localized #sites
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  • Profile picture of the author julianfssen
    Hey, there.

    Ideally, you'd want to choose the first option which redirects the pages to its closest corresponding English page. 301s are used to redirect visitors from old/broken pages to new/fixed pages - so the first option is the best choice SEO-wise.

    A site-wide redirect to your homepage is a bad idea, think of it this way; a person clicks on a page on you old website that is about red cars, with a site-wide redirect, you send this visitor to your homepage which does not contain any relevant information about red cars.

    A site-wide redirect should be the last of your choices; it can lead to manual penalties (I've seen it happen time and time again) and it can lead to a lot of irrelevancy issues which will ruin your page metrics (bounce rates, etc.)

    Thankfully, there are scripts and tutorials online that allow you to bulk redirect your old URLs. Google around and you'll be able to find easy solutions to bulk redirects.

    Let me know if you need help. Cheers.
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    • Profile picture of the author Hauberk
      Hi Julian,

      Thanks for your reply.

      Ideally, you'd want to choose the first option which redirects the pages to its closest corresponding English page. 301s are used to redirect visitors from old/broken pages to new/fixed pages - so the first option is the best choice SEO-wise.
      Will it be ok that the source page is in one language and a destination page - in English?

      A site-wide redirect should be the last of your choices; it can lead to manual penalties (I've seen it happen time and time again) and it can lead to a lot of irrelevancy issues which will ruin your page metrics (bounce rates, etc.)
      That makes sense. Thanks!
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  • Profile picture of the author Jefay
    Banned
    How are your going to localize your website? Will you just find someone who will translate the texts for you or will use a localization service for it? I have such a need too and I am going to try the service from https://alconost.com/en/services/website-translation for it. What do you think about it? I would appreciate some tips and thoughts on it
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