: SEO consequences for merging country sites in a .com I am in the process of refactoring a number of rental portals I've built for a company with locations in Austria, Germany, Switzerland, and

@Cody1181609

Actually, depending on how similar the content is for each region and what mechanism you use to distinguish the regions, you may potentially gain SEO juice from consolidating all versions under one domain, as some algorithms a penalty to sites with content that largely resembles a site on another domain. See Google's documentation on canonicalization.

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@Karen161

I would suggest utilizing a 301 redirect to a new subdomain location. Subdirectories aren't handled as well from an SEO perspective, and it also diminishes the geo-focus of a site.

I say this based off of practice, lest you wonder.

Another question is where the hosting is occurring for the international domains? Do you have them hosted in those countries or in the US? One big factor in international SEO is the hosted location of a site, yet another reason to utilize sub-domains. For a comparison I would also point to the actions of the engines. Yahoo utilizes a sub-domain redirect, and Google utilizes a completely separate URL (try Google.ca).
Unless you really, really have to move these I would probably leave them separate.

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@Kevin317

I can't tell you what the consequences of this will be for sure but I think you can do this and reasonably manage your rankings if you follow best practices.

If possible do a 301 redirect from the old URLs to the new URLs. This means for each and every page. This will let the search engines, and users, know the page has moved and let them know the location of the new page. If you keep your site structure and URLs the same (not including the root) then this should be as easy as a simple rule in your .htaccess file. If not then you'll need to make a rule for each page in your sites. There is a small hit taken when using 301 redirects but it's far better then not using them at all.

Google has a blog post about multi-regional sites that may be of use to you as well as one about multiple languages.

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@Sent6035632

SE robots do not know the term subdirectory (normally).

I've read that some SE robots do index content based on the language hinted by markup and http headers.

I dunno if a site can announce for which geo-coordinates it offers content. Would be new to me, might be possible.

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