Suppose my website is abc.com and currently has a presence in India.
Now I want to expand my business in Singapore, Malaysia, UAE, etc. My business is B2B. What should be my approach?
For India, it will be abc.com, For other locations:
Option 1: Country-specific domain: abc. sg
Option2: Subdomains with gTLD: sg. abc. com
Option3: Subdirectories with gTLD: abc. com/sg/
Option 4: URL parameters: abc. com?loc=sg
Answer:
abc.com/sg/ would be good as all the link juice could flow to the sub-directories and Google won't consider it as a new site as compared to sub-domains.
Cons.
One potential problem with this if you have the exact same content Google might ignore to index it or you may find you are not ranking high in the destination country.
Answer 2.
Option 1 or 3 are the best. In option 1 we will get separate more websites to optimize separately is good thing but we need more people for that and for option 3 as amit said "abc.com/sg/ would be good as all the link juice could flow to the sub-directories and Google won't consider it as a new site as compared to sub-domains."
Should recommend your clients for Option 1 with GSC setting + hreflang handling (as relevant). It works
The best option to Answer 2.
Question 2 )
Hello everyone.. Let's say we have 3 English websites:
ABC.com
ABC.co.uk
ABC.com.sg
If we implement hreflang tags on those websites, can we use the same text content on all the websites?
Answer 1)
Then the answer is no. Here are the reasons--
a) first and foremost content should be written for users and I am sure users in each of those countries will have different needs/pain points/search patterns. Your content should cater to the audiences respective to those countries and not really the search engines only.
b) Google will consider all 3 domains as 3 different sites. By putting hreflang tag you are just telling Google that you run various versions of the same business targeting to different countries. So yes, content has to be different too.
c) like I mentioned in point a) if you run same content then it may not give you visibility everywhere due to different search patterns. For example: if India searches for tour packages then USA searches for vacations and UAE searches for holiday packages.
