Multidomain Website/SEO and Setup

If all you want is translation of the pages on your site, then no a Network setup is not right for you. I’d suggest looking at the various translation plugins that are available.

The reason for this is that a Netowrk set up will be one code-base, but will still gove you three independant and separate websites, and that doesn’t sound like what you want to achive.

With the three different domains and how to get them set up for each region, that’s probably a better question for an SEO forum or specialist.

From what I understand, you would like fazinettel.com to operate as a multisite network so that you can manage your German, Austrian and French websites as subsites of fazinettel.com.

This can be achieved by turning fazinettel.com into a multi-site. You can find the steps for creating a multisite or turning your existing site into a multisite at the following URL https://multilingualpress.org/docs/how-to-install-wordpress-multisite/

Each site within the multisite network can have its own domain with different extensions ie .at .de .com etc and operate independently. This is because the multisite is configured in such a way that, although they share the same core database, each subsite also has its own database tables.

With a multisite, you only need to install your themes and plugins once, then choose which to enable on individual subsites.
The beauty of the multisite network is that you can manage all your sites from one source.

When you do decide to translate, there are various plugins that can be used, one of which is MultilingualPress

Hope this helps

Hi @catacaustic and @trudya, thanks a lot for your answers. So I have a question for both of you. If I set up fazinettel.com either as one website with a translation plugin or also as a multisite website, how would it work in the following case:

A user enters Fazinettel.de – where will he be redirected? How would I have to connect the .de, .at and .fr domains to my WordPress installation in either option?

Also currently my website as I said is setup in the .at domain and many pages rank quite well in Google. So in case I now move to fazinettel.com and somebody would klick on a link that is linked in google, like fazinettel.at/brotbeutel, would this still be working, can I redirect this somehow?

Best Daniel

Once you purchase a domain name, you need to set up the DNS so that users can find your domain online. You can read more about how to set up a DNS here

Whether you run your sites individually or as part of a multisite, users can just type the URL for each site to get to them, through Ads, Google Search, etc, for instance, amazon.co.uk, amazon.com or amazon.de, you don’t actually have to have them all listed on one site. Alternatively, you can have a dropdown menu prompting users to choose the country they want or any kind of menu or buttons, or even just links on your site leading to the other domains.

If you go down the multisite route, you will need to have the sites within the multisite to be able to treat them as subsites and control them. As you already have an established site, Fazinettel.at, but wish to have fazinettel.com as a multisite, there are a number of options open to you.

You can leave Fazinettel.at as an individual site and develop fazinettel.com as a multisite with other country extensions as its subsites, ie .de .fr, etc and just link to Fazinettel.at when necessary ie through a menu.

Another option would be to make fazinettel.com a multisite, then import Fazinettel.at into fazinettel.com so that it becomes a subsite of fazinettel.com.

The last, but probably the easiest option would be to make Fazinettel.at a multisite and use domain mapping to create custom names for the subsites

WordPress now comes with built-in domain mapping which maps your custom domains to your Site Address. This way you should be able to retain the URLs that were ranking high on Google. You can find out more about domain mapping here

If you decide to migrate Fazinettel.at so that it becomes a subsite of fazinettel.com, then you will need to use a plugin such as ALL-IN-ONE-WP-MIGRATION to achieve this. (It can be done manually but it is a lot easier with a plugin)
You will also need to install ALL-IN-ONE-WP-MIGRATION-MULTISITE and possibly ALL-IN-ONE-WP-MIGRATION-UNLIMITED-EXTENSION, if you have large files at fazinettel.at.

Hope this helps