SEO Question, for SEO Experts

[Rodrigo Farcas]

Hi there!

Recently we were working on a way to "make our site international" so we added subdomains, that filter all the content, depending on the detected country.

You are redirected to country.site.com

Example
If you visit from Argentina, you get ar.site.com
If you visit from Usa, you get usa.site.com
If you visit from England, you get en.site.com

The issue is after this, Google Pagerank tool shows our site with Pagerank 0.

If this a really bad thing? Should we stop this subdomain redirections? Any ideas or help will be much appreciated!

Thank you

 

[Rodrigo Farcas]

Right now it shows pagerank 0, once it redirect to cl.site.com, but in www.site.com, pagerank was 4

 

[CTXMedia]

Right now it shows pagerank 0, once it redirect to cl.site.com, but in www.site.com, pagerank was 4

AFAIK Google treats sub-domains as separate sites; so www. is a different site to cl.

If you want to retain your PR4 ranking for your main (www) site and still provide country specific entry points for your visitors, it might be worth using sub-directories instead, e.g.; www.site.com/en - www.site.com/cl - www.site.com/es - www.site.com/br - etc.

 

[karll]

I'm no SEO expert by any stretch of the imagination, but I know how to use Wikipedia! The page rank article there seems to make it clear that the page rank depends on incoming links. Since you have effectively changed your domain name by switching to subdomains, then the page rank will suffer. But I guess if you stop automatically redirecting from the "site.com" to the subdomains, then "site.com" will still have the good page rank.

 

[Carlos]

I'm no SEO expert by any stretch of the imagination, but I know how to use Wikipedia! The page rank article there seems to make it clear that the page rank depends on incoming links. Since you have effectively changed your domain name by switching to subdomains, then the page rank will suffer. But I guess if you stop automatically redirecting from the "site.com" to the subdomains, then "site.com" will still have the good page rank.

Bolded for emphasis. I couldn't have said it better myself.

Any time you change directory, or url structure, you lose your old rank.

Redirecting your old structure to the new structure will somewhat work, but it's going to take a long time to get back that "rank."

 

[Jason]

First, you can pretty much disregard the number you get with the PageRank tool. There are far more important things you can focus on that'll help you improve your search ranking.

Now, time for a history lesson... Google used to do what is known as 'host crowding' (it still happens, but more infrequently). That is, only two results would be shown for each hostname/subdomain. Obviously, people abused this by creating a number of subdomains for the same content with the sole aim at getting additional results on the page. Algorithms have since changed, and subdomains are now treated as internal links. In other words, subdomains and subdirectories are both treated the same for the sake of SERP.

As for personal preference, I prefer subdirectories if the content is related or mostly the same (which is the case for most i18n stuff), and using subdomains to separate out content that is completely different. For example, at Google we use subdomains for distinct products (e.g., maps.*, drive.*, wallet.*).

TL;DR, do what's most convenient for you.