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Thanks for taking the time into answering these questions! Regards!

Thanks Kate, I enjoyed reading the guide

Not knowing the site, the answer here will be quite generic. Said that, let's start from the misguided concept of Latin-America. Latin America actually really doesn't exist. If you tell to a mexican and argentinian they have practically the same culture or speak the same language, they will laugh at you. Seriously, the biggest error when targeting those countries, which include a not spanish speaking country as it Brasil, is considering them as they were a consistent set of nations. Said that, in your case, if you have the resources or the time to localize every single page of your site for all the countries, then you should have a site targeting all the spanish speaking language of Northern, Central and South America. In fact, doing some pages as common and some other localized in a subfolder, can lead to a bad user experience, because they should always shifting from a generic not targeted page to the targeted one. But on the long term, and basing the choice on from where the highest organic traffic is coming, I would start preparing and publishing the localized versions for each country. In order to avoid potential duplicated or substantially duplicated content you can use the rel="alternate" hreflang="x-X" markup, so to tell Google to show - for instance - the /mx/... URLs just to the users searching from Mexico and the /ar/... URLs only to the Argentinians searching in Google.com.ar. Obviously, you will have also to geotarget the folder in GWT and earn local links in order to reinforce the geotargeting of your subfolder.s

Thanks to all for your input! I am thinking we will try translating URLs in one language to test the impact. Thanks again

Hello there, Have a look at this list and see if there is anything good. http://www.search-motive.com/rank-higher-on-google-places-top-uk-business-listings-you-want-to-be-on/ Cheers Oscar

Thanks for the reply Theo In my mind it made sence that I should be able to move host to a different country with not too many problems. Most of my other sites are UK based with a UK target audience I just wanted to make sure that I wouldn't be rocking the boat too much with a change of country and had it been hosted in a country where there was a decent level of traffic coming from then I'd have not considered thinking of moving it, the German hosting just threw me a curve ball I wanted to make sure I didn't ruin anything. A fast US or UK server does sound like it would be OK to switch to. With regards to a CDN solution, there are no images or such on the site and the pages are very small file sizes so I'm unsure that it would make too much different to the load times, however a very good suggestion and once I get ownership of the site I'll check that that is still the case. With regards to the .info domain, I know it's not ideal but the site I am buying is around 6 years old so I'm just going to have to live with it for this site, had it only been a year or 2 old I'd have given it a bit more thought.

Glad I could help.  If you any other assistance, don't hesitate to drop me a line.

Hi Norberto, The IP location it's a signal although it used to be stronger in the past and having a US IP won't interfere on ranking in Spain, for example. Now Google has additional and stronger  signals: like the use of a ccTLD or geolocating in Google Webmaster Tools, plus specifying the region also in the hreflang annotations and your content itself: adding the location where it's targeted to in the different elements of the pages. Of course, if you can invest on hiring a hosting service with an IP in the location where you're targeted and won't suppose a too high investment for you, do it (it will likely impact positively on the site speed, for example), but as also happens with other factors and signals in SEO, is that the benefits you get should surpass the cost of the changes you'll do. Thanks!

Super, Thanks Gianluca for the spot.

Never ever rely only on GTranslate for International SEO. Simply don't.

Hi Bram, For this issue there is an easy fix -> the use of hreflang. This will take care of all issues you've mention. See more at: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077 Hope it helps. Cheers !

Hi there, There's much more you can do: Link all of your language versions using a crawlable language menu. Like this Google will be able to initially crawl and index these versions. Create a Google Webmaster Tools profile for each one of your language versions independently, like this you will be able to generate a specific XML for each (besides tracking each one of them much more easily), and if they are not only language targeted but also, country targeted, you can also geolocate them through GWT too. Add to each specific XML sitemap the hreflang annotations referring to the language of each one of your websites as specified here. To help you with this you can use this MediaFlow tool. Add the hreflang annotations in the HTML too, in the head section of the HTML of each one of your different pages, as specified here. The more of these you do, the easier will be for Google to identify that these new version of your sites are targeting these additional languages. Thanks!

Thanks for the responses. Yes, I've read about and have seen how Google has buried the function and agree that I think it may be a combination of downgrading/deprecating it as well as perhaps it is needed less with their capabilities to serve up results based on personalization, social signals, improved geo-targeting, etc. Cheers

Is there a subdomain for each language? Is there a "default" language that exists on the primary domain (i.e. English on www.yourwebsite.com)? Are you using rel href lang, X-Default Hrefe Lang, rel canonical, or other "tags" or solutions for this at the moment? If you could share the website address we wouldn't have to ask these questions, by the way. I know that is especially tough on client sites, but I just wanted to say that Dave has asked some vital questions, including the one about setting each subdomain as its own language / geographic target audience. Here is what he is asking about: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=62399 It is not necessary to have completely unique content for each language, as someone suggested below.

Hi, I am also looking into the same issue and agree that a ccTLD is the ideal solution, but I am also aware of potential problems that can bring in a different area. My experience is only with Germany and I can only speak for that country, but it is likely that the same applies elsewhere. The minute you set up a .de domain, you come under German taxation rules - ie. you become liable to pay tax in Germany on all your income from that country. You also come under all other relevant German laws. In our case we offer language travel to the UK and we would need to set up a protection scheme as required in Germany to protect travellers' money in the case of our going bankrupt. This alone is a very complicated scheme and failure to get it right can lead to nasty consequences! Large companies with a team of international lawyers behind them can no doubt deal with all that ccTLD involves. Smaller companies just won't have the resources but they need to treat this issue with care.

Anyway, I saw too many domain.co.uk in SERP in google.co.uk more than in google.com

I've been tasked with helping the IT department of a large company make a case for keeping their regional website and simply re-branding over having their website absorbed into that of their parent company(located elsewhere in the world). If I was the boss at the parent company I would be looking at the historical performance data of the two websites and then looking at the opportunities for the two websites being operated separately or combined given additional investment/restructuring.

You're welcome

The example.ca ccTLD would definitely have an advantage over the example.com/ca directory. I have not heard nor experienced that there is any benefit to the .com domain with regard to ranking in other countries just because a ccTLD for that country redirects to it. However, if the ccTLD has lots of country-specific links the 301 would be applying those links to the .com domain and in this way it could help the .com domain rank better in that country. Using cross-domain rel href lang tags should have about the same effect though (i.e. consolidating link signals). It is not a best practice to have your home page exist in a sub directory (e.g. example.ca/canada) and I would instead put it in the root (i.e. example.ca/). However, if you are going to be 301 redirecting that domain to example.com/ca/canada/... it doesn't really matter. Best practice would be to put the language directory first, before the file name, such as: example.ca/en-ca/filename. Be sure to read up on recent rel href lang attribute implementation: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077 For "default" pages: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2013/04/x-default-hreflang-for-international-pages.html Specifiying the language in sitemaps: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2620865 There are so many things to consider when choosing whether to go with separate ccTLDs or a single site that it is difficult to give a clear answer regarding which is best. For this client, given development preferences, scalability issues, cost, consolidation of page-rank, consistent branding, etc... it may very well be the best choice to consolidate the sites. For another business my advice might be different. To reiterate what I started with though: All other things being equal I think a ccTLD would outrank a .com site with a country-specific directory in that country. But all things are NEVER equal. Good luck!

Using ccTLDs is the heaviest factor you could use to geotarget your websites and in that case you shouldn't need to use local IP addresses for geotargeting, although if you have the budget, it could give you an extra boost along helping you with other factors such as latency. You won't be able to use Google's webmaster tools geographic target since this feature is only for gTLDs, ccTLDs are targeted to it's country by default. Some resources that could prove useful: Working with multi-regional websites International SEO: Where to Host and How to Target - Whiteboard Friday