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Did you see the alternate language tags? <link href="http://www.freelancer.com/" hreflang="en" rel="alternate"><link href="http://www.freelancer.com.au/" hreflang="en-AU" rel="alternate"><link href="http://www.freelancer.co.nz/" hreflang="en-NZ" rel="alternate"><link href="http://www.freelancer.mx/" hreflang="es-MX" rel="alternate">This is the method they choose to serve the correct domain to the correct audience.

Thanks Oleg and Irving! There are only very minor differences between the countries that speak the same languages. Sometimes there will be price differences, though not always, and we use callcenters that have different phone numbers for different countries. That's all though, and so that's not much. So, we don't need the country in the URL. We would be able to determine country by using Geo IP and preselect that. I guess the most important question for is, if there's any reason you think we should include the country in the URL anyway?

My Pleasure Falk

Hi Iain, Great question. Like a lot of things in SEO, the answer of whether or not to use a ccTLD is... it depends. Pros Using a country level domain can boost your SEO targeting in that specific area, may help with click-through rate depending on local biases, and sometimes it's easier to create a country specific "brand" with this approach. Cons You have to do SEO for each site. Your Italian site may get links, which doesn't help your German site. Duplicate content becomes an issue if you publish the same articles on multiple sites. Maintaining muplitple sites becomes harder. Questions to Ask Will you publish content in multiple languages? If so, will you publish multiple versions of the same content? If so, you will want to make use of the hreflang tag. Are you targeting specific countries, or multi-country regions? If it's the latter, than a single domain may be more efficient. I'm not a true expert on international SEO, but one of the best overviews of the topic I've seen is this WBF by Rand: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-where-to-host-and-how-to-target-whiteboard-friday You may also want to check out this post: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-dropping-the-information-dust Regardless, hope this gives you something to think about. Best of luck with your SEO!

I'm not sure if D/A has a great deal to do with bounce rates. If the new site is going to be the new kid in town, you should get good signals if the users go from the original to the new one anyway. Just let them know you will comply, but they may notice a slight decline in ranking until the new site is fully established and the old one properly redirected. This way your letting them know and covering your behind should things decline in anyway. In the end you got to do what the customer wants. All the best.

I would say most likely yes. US sites still show internationally so if your main target audience is in the U.S I would keep that as the target rather than risk anything. All the best.

Well Frist off I think Wordpress is the way to go ( I need time to get the info to show you why.) Zerigo GEO DNS ($20) & DNS Made Easy GEO DNS ($50) AWS Route 53 GEO DNS ($?) Zerigo geo is fast very very fast to see run http://wpengine.com DynECT geo ($209) UltraDNS geo ( $200) Your DNS https://blueprintmrk.sharefile.com/?cmd=d&id=004ca177abe44293 Hosting http://www.stormondemand.com/ http://www.firehost.com/compare https://www.zunicore.com/features/ http://www.peer1.com/cloud-hosting/hpc-cloud/comparison The real speed host http://mediatemple.net/helix/ CDN http://www.turbobytes.com/ I will add more feel free to email me if you need to know why Wordpress. I will send a PM All the best, Tom

Howdy! Just wanted to point out this question is several months old. The statement about "The same content in another language can trigger duplicate content issues" was a bit surprising to hear. Can you provide some more information about that? I'm more accustomed to what Google says in places like http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=182192#3 where they state "Websites that provide content for different regions and in different languages sometimes create content that is the same or similar but available on different URLs. This is generally not a problem as long as the content is for different users in different countries. While we strongly recommend that you provide unique content for each different group of users, we understand that this may not always be possible. There is generally no need to "hide" the duplicates by disallowing crawling in a robots.txt file or by using a "noindex" robots meta tag." Matt Cutts also talks about it being OK in a video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDg2AGRGjLQ. I'm also interested in knowing more about content needing to be relative to the directory name. Can you give a few more details?

Hi Joel, There are not much more specific things you can do.  The type of SEO you do that target US will also work in UK like creating content with keywords, on-page SEO, joining UK's social networks, sharing, backlinks and etc. One suggestion I can give is the language you use.  Although people speak english in UK but the way they spell may be different; for example, "optimize" and "optimise."  Same meaning but different spelling.  SO make sure your content includes the spelling people use in UK since that might be the way they search.

Thanks Tommy!

I understand your position and agree it is a good strategy for large and mid-size businesses. I would agree it is a good strategy for small businesses as well, but it may not be practical. Ideally every business who registers a trademark would expand their registration to every country, but the cost is simply not affordable to everyone. Domain registration is much less expensive, but it also requires an annual fee. There is a lot too consider.