Google: ccTLD & Wildcard Subdomain Strategies Won't Give You An "Unnatural Advantage"

Dec 4, 2013 - 9:05 am 9 by

serversGoogle's John Mueller responded to a detailed technical question regarding ccTLDs, wildcard subdomains and the likelihood of it being seen as doorway pages in a Stack Exchange thread.

In short, the webmaster wants to create websites that would target city names around the world, whereby TLD for each countries will be used. Here is the mapping they were considering:

www.website.de for let's say Germany and www.website.cn for China and the sub-domains will be www.berlin.website.de and www.beijing.website.cn, as an example.

Google's John Mueller responded that this won't be a good idea.

Let me share John's full response since it can be a bit technical:

My first thought when reading the question was that this is going to be a case for the web-spam team. Please don't create tons of sites that are essentially doorway pages. Also, using wildcard subdomains (assuming the idea is to map them to cities after DNS resolution) make it extremely hard to determine how those URLs should be crawled.

Additionally, I think it's important to mention that a site using this kind of URL structure won't see any unnatural advantage in search. Search engines are just as good at handling URL parameters, there's no need to make it look like a website focused on [cityname],[countryname] when it's essentially just a part of the same website. Unless you have very good reasons to do this outside of web-search, I would recommend simplifying things significantly.

For geotargeting, using a ccTLD is a good way to let users & search engines know about your target audience. For Google, you can also use a gTLD (even the same one for all your sites) and work with subdirectories or subdomains to apply geotargeting there too. That saves you from having to get & maintain all those ccTLDs.

For multilingual content, at least from Google's point of view, the URL is irrelevant as long as it's unique. Use whatever URL structure works for you (and look into using hreflang where it makes sense).

Venturing overseas with content, especially with travel destination like sites, can be very tricky. This is especially true in the Panda world.

Forum discussion at Stack Exchange.

Image credit to BigStockPhoto for global servers

 

Popular Categories

The Pulse of the search community

Search Video Recaps

 
- YouTube
Video Details More Videos Subscribe to Videos

Most Recent Articles

Web Analytics

Google Analytics Real Time Reporting Glitching

Apr 23, 2025 - 10:54 am
Search Forum Recap

Daily Search Forum Recap: April 23, 2025

Apr 23, 2025 - 10:00 am
Google Search Engine Optimization

Google Stops Supporting Special Announcement Structured Data On July 31

Apr 23, 2025 - 7:51 am
Google

More Studies Show AI Overviews Harm Google Click Through Rates

Apr 23, 2025 - 7:41 am
Google Maps

Google Posts Go Missing From Local Panels

Apr 23, 2025 - 7:35 am
Google Maps

Google Business Profiles Video Verification Gets Video Previews

Apr 23, 2025 - 7:31 am
Previous Story: Smartphone Crawl Errors Added To Google Webmaster Tools