Forum Moderators: phranque
I am starting a classifieds site in English. But I am very confused about certain issues, and from a past experience I think WW is the best place to post this.
I have a classified site in Arabic; example.com . It ranks 4 in Google and has good Alexa ranking. It also gets good serps in Google. When I first thought about starting an English version of the site, I wanted to list only Arab countries. But I figured out that there will be little ads, coz Arabs will mostly post ads in Arabic, except for few Arab counties that post in both Arabic and English. So I thought it is better to include English speaking countries along with the most important Arab countries in regards to classifieds posting.
Now the case is that I want to take advantage of the good rankings and fast G indexing of example.com. So I uploaded the new English site in a subdirectory. So the New site is example.com/en.
Now the problem is that the [domain name] word means [something] in Arabic, But it does not mean anything in English. And my target is English speaking ppl!
Thus I got a new domain; [snip] … I think it is not bad … What do you think?!
Anyway, I uploaded another classified site to [the new domain]. And I think it will be more appealing to ppl with English as a first language. Moreover, the site is on an independent domain, not a subdirectory.
But the problem here is that the domain is new and it has no rank whatsoever, and I know it will take a heck of time to rank well in search engines. But anyway, I will link well to it in [the Arabic site] and in my other sites (one of them ranks 5 in Google but it’s an educational site). Plus I will start a good marketing campaign for [the English site].
But I’m so confused. And frankly, my main target now it to earn money fast from Adsense in that English classifieds site.
And I want to now which is the faster method in terms of revenue for this site; should I put it in a subdirectory of [the Arabic site] or in the new domain [the English site]?
I sometimes think the answer is very simple and obvious, but when I take into consideration the many factors involved, I get confused.
I’d very much appreciate any help or tip.
Thanks in advance!
[edited by: phranque at 11:30 pm (utc) on July 18, 2009]
[edit reason] No urls, please. See TOS [webmasterworld.com] [/edit]
Now the case is that I want to take advantage of the good rankings and fast G indexing of example.com. So I uploaded the new English site in a subdirectory. So the New site is example.com/en.
that will not necessarily apply to your english content.
your arabic content will never or rarely be linked to by english sites or appear in english searches and vice versa.
in your case, i would go with the separate domain.
if the domain name was based on a company or organization you might consider a language-based subdomain but in the case of a keyword domain name you are probably better off with the [new domain] for your english content.
Have you considered adding an arabic/english translation feature to the site instead?
i have to challenge your suggestion:
Have you considered adding an arabic/english translation feature to the site instead?
instead i would go with the clear and knowledgeable advice provided by bill (with the unanimous consent of others) in this thread -
Is Auto-Translating a Webpage Into Another Language Popular [webmasterworld.com]:
If you want to target a language market you should just forget about auto-translation altogether.
