views:

33

answers:

1

Hi! Is it possible to get two "editions" of a website both indexed by the major search engines (Google/Yahoo/Bing/Teoma) which differ in content language only and are hosted under different TLDs?

Say English content is available at "http://domain.com/", German content at "http://domain.de/". Now, if e.g. Google.com is used I want it to list the "domain.com" entry and vice versa. Is "Duplicate Content" an issue here?

Thanks so much for advising me!

+1  A: 

Depending on website software you use (wordpress, joomla, custom, etc), you might have a plugin or addon for each that supports multiple domains and search-engine pinging/seo. If that's the case, it should be possible.

I'm assuming your website layout is the same but you have a ".com" and ".de" TLD pointing to the same directory/software installation and a (auto?) language selector to choose between English and German.

Edit: (for quick readers)

It shouldn't need separate webspace for each site. What I do for my sites to get them submitted is use Sitemaps. I've never generated one myself, so I can't help in that aspect. However, you could generate sitemaps for each language (e.g. sitemap.en.xml.gz | sitemap.de.xml.gz) and have your application ping search engines with these sitemaps. Essentially, you'll have the same content but in different languages and it'll be in a sitemap which can be submitted to google/bing/yahoo/etc.

I used this method on a wordpress blog I had and every time I submitted/changed content, it would re-generate sitemaps (updating links/etc) and ping the search engines again.

Zack
Zack, I'm not using any website software, everything's hand coded. I think the layout for both "site editions" will nearly be the same. I wonder if this is recognized by/important to the robots somehow!? The ".com" TLD will point to "root/en/", the ".de" equivalent to "root/de/" and each site having a simple link (to the other) to change the preferred language. Might this be an issue with getting both sites indexed? Would it be favorable to use separate webspace for each domain?
mojo77
It shouldn't need separate webspace for each site. What I do for my sites to get them submitted is use Sitemaps. I've never generated one myself, so I can't help in that aspect. However, you could generate sitemaps for each language (e.g. sitemap.en.xml.gz | sitemap.de.xml.gz) and have your application ping search engines with these sitemaps. Essentially, you'll have the same content but in different languages and it'll be in a sitemap which can be submitted to google/bing/yahoo/etc.
Zack
I used this method on a wordpress blog I had and every time I submitted/changed content, it would re-generate sitemaps (updating links/etc) and ping the search engines again.
Zack
Updated original reply with these comments.
Zack