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If done correctly, changing DNS for an existing site shouldn't result in any downtime, Charles. There will likely be a short period where some users will begin seeing the new site while others are still seeing the old site, the site will never appear "down". The length of time where visitors may see a mix of the old & new sites can be significantly reduced by setting short TTL times on the DNS settings before the actual final changeover takes place. Paul

Hey there, Lowercase is fine. Not sure why you would have /nl-nl/ and /nl-en/ though, it's either English or Dutch, right? I've set this up many times before and it works just fine, although it's sometimes a little overkill unless you have the English version of a page ranking higher than the Dutch version in Google.nl for example. I usually find adding these as separate websites in WMT's and setting the target country correctly for each site you shouldn't have any problems. So add http://www.domain.com/nl/ as its own site in WMT and set target country to Netherlands, then add http://www.domain.com/en/ as another site and set its target country to UK. Hope this helps, Goodluck, Woody

We have a morality panel?!??!?! WOW!!! Rand for pope maybe?

Having the ccTLD should be good enough to signal Google that your site is targeting that country.  However, the lang tag and currency pre-fix do give Google more information.  If you have a physical address in that location, definitely include it.  If not, I am not sure how much of a factor it will play.  Usually the ccTLD should tell Google about your targeting location.

Hello Thanks for your help. I think the best in my case gonna be to keep the strucutre /middle-east and /asia but to use a robot.txt for those subfolders (apart the who are we page). As explained I have to work also on the brand names which are different in those cases. So the main SEO effort will be on the .com. The other sub-folders will be more for users. Tks for your valuable help !

I'm sorry, Raymond. When I replied the last sentence I saw of your post was "Or does it only matter that all the citations are as similar as possible to one another?" and did not see your examples. Thanks for the post, though! This is an area I will be looking forward to learn more about. Best, Amber

There should be no problem hosting CSS & Javascript on a CDN. It will help the site load faster, and Google shouldn't be crawling those files anyway. Not sure what you are asking about Google Translator.

Hi Simon, thanks for the help and noticing that!  We actually noticed there were 302 redirects causing issues which we removed on February 5th, so you're right, Google probably hasn't cached the updated version of our site..hopefully!

Hi Luis, You can do a change address in Google webmaster tools account once the 301 re-direction is in place. Here you go for more info: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=83106 For more about moving your website: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=83105 Best regards, Devanur Rafi.

Thanks Charlie, I think it would be good for us to chat. As our clients are spread throughout the UK and world I dont' think location is a problem. Should I call you via your website? Colin

From my experience of hreflang it seems that Google still doesn't always display the correct URL in SERPs. In addition we still see duplicates flagged up in Webmaster tools even though hreflang is present on these pages. We have only ever used hreflang for different English language versions rather than different languages so I can't call upon any personal experience examples to illustrate when using only language variables. I've found using the SEOMoz SERP Control panel so I can switch between different search engines (e.g Google UK, Google Us, Google Aus) is great for keeping track of how you appear in SERPs in each country you are targetting. .[image: vMGaeKwTYLbkrZFi6lyHAqOxlHcbMdYUAo7IrZFi6lyHAqOxlHcbMdYUAo7IrZFi6lyHAqOxlHcbMdYUAo7IrZFi6lyHAqOxlHcbMdYUAo7IrZFi6lyHAqOxlHcbMdYUAo7IrZFi6lyHAqOxlHcbMdYUAo7IrZFi6lyHAqOxlHcbMdYWAlH4KyNVhls4Q8BYEbB8P8BZzmZ0MAVcIsAmGK2RYupchwKjsZR3GzHWFAKOyK2RYupchwKjsZR3GzHWFAKOyK2RYupchwKjsZR3GzHWFAKOyK2RYupchwKjsZR3GzHWFAKOyK2RYupchwKjsZR3GzHWFAKOyK2RYupchwKjsZR3GzHWFAKOyK2RYupchwKjsZR3GzHWFwP8Drt56sz5Ky80AAAAASUVORK5CYII=]

HI Maxime, If you have all your pages under different folders www.yoursite.com/en-uk or www.yoursite.com/en-us, they are all under one site and you share backlinks.  That is one of the benefits of creating subfolders or subdomains when you plan to go global/international with your website instead of creating a completely new website. Hope this helps.

Open your Analytics. Open Audience > Demographics > Language Do you have any worthwhile languages to target after US and UK?  maybe a generic EN, maybe FR or de-de, possibly ES? If you want to use a hreflang on .eu, I would suggest the generic EN.  That's what Google suggests here, as well: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2620865

Also, just to complete this, you can now use the rel=hreflang tag to tell Google when you have duplicate content that is directed at different countries.  If the content is truly duplicate, you can use the rel=canonical (but be careful about using both at the same time).  Check this post for mor details: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2232347/A-Simple-Guide-to-Using-relalternate-hreflangx

Hi Keri, Steve and Russ, I'm glad to weigh in on this if Steve needs a little more help.  In short, my opinion is going to be very close to Russ, but I'm going to articulate it in a different way: You talk about building a product based strategy rather than branding.  I'd have to say that building the brand is going to be more important. The structure that Russ proposes allows you to leverage the authority of the whole site, rather than starting from scratch.  And isn't that going to be better for your best product as well as those you have deemed secondary?

For Amazon and other massive sites, they have both .com and .co.uk is because they are targeting different people from different locations with tthe site.  The .com domain is targeting people in the US and .co.uk is for people in UK.  Therefore, when people search for Amazon, the .com domain will be the one that appears in search engine while the .co.uk domain will appear in the results for people in UK searching for Amazon. If you want to rank better in Google.com, then you can create a .com domain and for .co.uk you can create a new website with the .uk ccTLD or create a subfolder within your .com domain geotargeting UK.