Do you have content organized by geographic area?

[MichaelCorfman]

Some webmasters operate sites that have content separated into different geographic areas. When content is separated into geographic areas, some webmasters will operate different registered domains for different geographic areas (e.g., brandname.au, brandname.uk, etc). Other webmasters will use subdomains for different geographic areas (e.g., au.brandname.com, uk.brandname.com, etc.) And still other webmasters will separate content into different directories on the same site for different geographic areas (e.g., brandname.com/au/ and brandname.com/uk/). And some webmasters will do some combination of these methods, using two or more of different domains, different subdomains, and different subdirectories for geographic areas they cover.

I was thinking about this today when I made the following announcement post:

Portal sites must now have distinct host names to be listed in GPWA directories.

For today's poll I ask if you have any content organized by geographic area. And, if you do, which of the approaches outlined above you use, or whether you use some other method to organize geographic content.

Besides voting in the poll, please share how you organize content on your websites and why.

Michael

[Oliver Cooper]

Can you now tell me more about subdirectories?

[dannyx]

I use subdirectories and this solution seems to be the most advantageous for me for many reasons, of course, for another there may be another option.

The most important, is that the main English site in which it is not a problem to search for keywords, good multi-level internal links and generally work to improve the quality of the site, can pull up other versions.

I can't imagine competing with sites in languages one doesn't know, not to mention languages exotic to Latin alphabet speakers.
Searching for internal links in languages like Russian, Chinese, Japanese, will be hard for an EU/US person. Of course, in the other strobe probably the same.

And if these pages are not separated from the main site they gain authority from the main site.

Plus, subdirectories are much easier to manage.

Separate pages may have security advantages, though.

But with today's competition, it's better to consolidate the power and juice of the site to compete.

However, I'm talking about languages, not targeting specific countries. I'm thinking about geolocation, but as I see how many players use VPNs, I'd rather make it clear with operators what the country restrictions are.

[MichaelCorfman]

Can you now tell me more about subdirectories?

For the Casino City brand, we sometimes use subdirectories and sometimes use domains and sometimes use subdomains for location-specific information. One factor for us is whether we are able to register the domain for a particular country at all, or for a reasonable price. Some countries have requirements that are hard to meet. For example, some countries refuse to register domains that have the word casino in them, or require that you have a local presence or own a trademark in the country. And there are a few countries that charge hundreds of dollars per year for domain registration. For example, the best price I have seen for the African country of Niger (domain.ne) is 242.80€. That's just not worth it to me. Another factor is whether we have content appropriate to a particular country.

When we do own a country top level domain, we place our country-specific content on a website using that domain, even when we have a very limited amount of content. For example, for Albania we have the site www.casinocity.al. Albania is an example of a country where registration is also hard for gambling-related domains. We were initially rejected several times when we tried to register that domain. But, eventually, after we documented for the Albanian authorities that we would only use the site to provide information about gaming properties licensed by Albania, they agreed our registration of the domain was acceptable.

When we have content about a country, but have not acquired the domain, then we use subdirectories. For example, we have information about the one casino we know about that is physically located in Mali within the following subdirectory of the casino city site: www.casinocity.com/mali/.

From an intellectual property perspective, we view it as desirable to own the country top level names for our brand. And we also view there can be some SEO advantages to having a collection of such domains cross-linked to one another. In total we own over 100 such domains, and we (of course) have a large number of relevant cross-links between them. But SEO dynamics have evolved a lot over the years. And it has become much more important that it once was to consolidate content on one large site. That didn't used to be the case. Going back a couple decades, at one time we used subdomains to create separate sites for each physical casino in the world. Having thousands of such sites linked to one another produced amazing results back then. But, not anymore. For many years now, that approach has been harmful rather than helpful from an SEO perspective. Although we do still use a few subdomains. For example, our content for the state of Nevada is hosted on the subdomain nevada.casinocity.com.

The bottom line, is that today I think for most webmasters, consolidating content on a larger size and using subdirectories to separate content by country is probably both the easiest approach and the most effective approach from an SEO perspective.

Michael

[Oliver Cooper]

I didn’t even expect such a detailed answer, thanks a lot!

[Pokerface]

This is something we have planned coming up in the near future for sure.

[NoDepositCasinos]

For the Casino City brand, we sometimes use subdirectories and sometimes use domains and sometimes use subdomains for location-specific information. One factor for us is whether we are able to register the domain for a particular country at all, or for a reasonable price. Some countries have requirements that are hard to meet. For example, some countries refuse to register domains that have the word casino in them, or require that you have a local presence or own a trademark in the country. And there are a few countries that charge hundreds of dollars per year for domain registration. For example, the best price I have seen for the African country of Niger (domain.ne) is 242.80€. That's just not worth it to me. Another factor is whether we have content appropriate to a particular country.

When we do own a country top level domain, we place our country-specific content on a website using that domain, even when we have a very limited amount of content. For example, for Albania we have the site www.casinocity.al. Albania is an example of a country where registration is also hard for gambling-related domains. We were initially rejected several times when we tried to register that domain. But, eventually, after we documented for the Albanian authorities that we would only use the site to provide information about gaming properties licensed by Albania, they agreed our registration of the domain was acceptable.

When we have content about a country, but have not acquired the domain, then we use subdirectories. For example, we have information about the one casino we know about that is physically located in Mali within the following subdirectory of the casino city site: www.casinocity.com/mali/.

From an intellectual property perspective, we view it as desirable to own the country top level names for our brand. And we also view there can be some SEO advantages to having a collection of such domains cross-linked to one another. In total we own over 100 such domains, and we (of course) have a large number of relevant cross-links between them. But SEO dynamics have evolved a lot over the years. And it has become much more important that it once was to consolidate content on one large site. That didn't used to be the case. Going back a couple decades, at one time we used subdomains to create separate sites for each physical casino in the world. Having thousands of such sites linked to one another produced amazing results back then. But, not anymore. For many years now, that approach has been harmful rather than helpful from an SEO perspective. Although we do still use a few subdomains. For example, our content for the state of Nevada is hosted on the subdomain nevada.casinocity.com.

The bottom line, is that today I think for most webmasters, consolidating content on a larger size and using subdirectories to separate content by country is probably both the easiest approach and the most effective approach from an SEO perspective.

Michael

Thank you for your thoughtful response. So far, I've only used subdirectories because I see it as more advantageous/practical, but I appreciate you sharing your work and how things were decades ago when many of us didn't even think about getting into this.

[ocreditor]

Using different domains for this purpose

[AlisaBar]

Hi, we also use subdirectories. From our experience, they perform better than domains. At least for our website.

[kimelmargaret]

On our SmartBonus portal, we actively use an approach focused on specific geographic regions—in our case, Austria and to a lesser extent, Germany. We consider this approach most beneficial as it allows us to precisely tailor our offers and promotions to the specificities and needs of local users.
Regarding work with multilingual content, we are currently focused on the German language, which is the primary language of our audience. In the future, we consider expanding and adding other languages, but this will require additional efforts in adaptation and content management.