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Ask HN: Domain name strategy when expanding a regional app?
In law school, I created oregonlaws.org which makes the Oregon Revised Statutes (the "laws") much easier to read and link to. It's very popular, and it serves its audience well even though it's a ".org" because 99% of visitors enter via web search to a leaf node page. They don't type the domain name. People in Oregon call the site, "Oregon Laws". So I think it's important that each state site have some identity, and not be generic.
Now I'm making instances for the rest of the U.S. states, and some foreign countries. And I'm unsure about how to use domains for this "version 2". SEO is very important to this project. And so I may be overthinking the domain name strategy, but I want to avoid pitfalls. I've come up with these ideas:
* Since oregonlaws.org is a success, I can follow that example and register a unique name for every jurisdiction, whatever's available. E.g., `virginialaw.online`, `washingtonlaws.org`, etc.
* Come up with a new app name and use sub-paths for each jurisdiction. I prototyped that route with `weblaws.org`. I.e., `weblaws.org/newyork/law...`
* Use a new app name and sub-domains for each geographical area. This is what I'm currently going with. I registered `public.law`. The ".law" domain is restricted to attorney/law-firm use. I see this as a good thing. And so I'm prototyping e.g., `newyork.public.law`.
Generally, a person at one of these geographical/jurisdiction sites will never want to see info from another. Although, in the future, I will add cross-area search.
The tension for me is e.g. Paul Graham's advice to always use a .com: http://www.paulgraham.com/name.html
Also, the decision to use subdomains might negatively impact SEO.
Thanks for any feedback!
- bigiain 9y agoFirstly - keep in mind most advice about SEO becomes outdated fairly quickly if it's "cheap and effective". Secondly, I've have very little to do with SEO in the last 7-8 years, so most of my advice should be viewed very much through the lens of my first point. But, my advice for what it's worth - optimise for long term, which for me mostly means doing the most reliable technical thing that avoids the bulk of the SEO problems. I'd go for geographical subdomains of a keyword relevant .com - or second choice geographical sub-paths. That give you the greatest ability to easily automate new regions - and avoids manual search and selection of unique top level names each time, as well as ensuring you don't fall victim to entire odd-ball TLDs (line .online) sometime in the future becoming spam-havens and SEO "bad neighborhoods". You'd need to talk to someone reliable and reasonable who's current on the SEP impact of subdomains vs paths, but I did _very_ nicely using city and state based subdomains (over 1600 of them at peak) back int he mid 2000's (which is likely to have put it in the "cheap and effective" category - so perhaps the ranking algorithms have punished it in the meantime...)
- dogweather 9y agoThanks! Good to hear that the subdomain approach has worked. Google's official policy seems to be that there's no benefit to one way over the other. I.e., create the content and the links, and Google will figure out how the sites are related: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/subdomains-vs-subfolders-seo/239795/ https://www.searchenginejournal.com/subdomains-vs-subfolders... Of course, that's only Google ... other engines may not be as smart.
- matt_the_bass 9y agoI think the fundamental issue is you need to work had to provide content. If you have relevant content, you will rank well in searches.