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No... the main domain has name in french, the domain is a .com but is geotargeted in google master tools to france. The only language is that site is in french, but because estructure i have to maintain the /fr in the url.

Sherry, First, you are going to use Google US or Google Mexico. Next, you are looking for odd queries that will not exist. Try searching on ropas and then vender ropas. Or try searching on abogados. What you will see is that the results are all over the place. The most telling is ropas - search returns everything from the designer by that name, rock/paper/scissors game, ropas (as clothes in ES), etc. If you then look at abogados, you see the attorneys who get multilingual and those who don't.  I was talking with one of our fluent Spanish speaking SEO's and we stuck in zapatos rojos. (Red Shoes). I am a big believer in what an excellent company Zappos is, but their ad returned a Spanish title with totally English ad. If you type in English and Spanish, (which is going to be rare, I repeat - rare) you will see what comes up and you can do the KW research on the terms. I will say to you what I say to many: If this is not something you are strong in, find a company that will work with you and let you learn as you work with your client and them. (Get an upfront agreement that they cannot approach, etc., NDA,). I can tell you I am not too proud to ask for assistance and recently contacted a European SEO firm re a Chinese site we are going to handle. I will work with them as I have no experience in that market or with Baidu directly. You cannot be afraid to say you don't know it all in this business. Trust me, I am here to learn just like you. Best

Eyepaq, You do have a point (and thanks for pointing out how it's CTR that is affected and not buying behavior). That said, I do not think the drop would be anywhere close to even 20% given you are switching to a .com. The world is used to .com's. What would be affecting it initially would be the movement of link juice, but he is not going to drop right away with the old domain even with the 301. So, organically he will see some diminution likely, but I doubt a lot. Again, all of this MUST be weighed. There will be trade-offs. He must decide with the client what the tradeoffs are they want to achieve their goals. Best,

Thanks Tim.  I followed your method for 1 site which is only in one language to deindex bad urls: Disallow: /es/ Disallow: /pt/ .. ... following your advise and this thread http://drupal.org/node/78313 , and watching how works translation redirect for solve this in other sites with multiples languages. Thanks.

Hi, Sorry for not answering before but I was expecting some more thoughts from Seomoz or the community.. Although your thoughts are good, I don't think you answered my question. I think the problem was the question itself, after some thought I can rephrase it: The real question may be: What is the best international/multilingual website structure to target google local, where you only have 1 location and compete in many countries and different languages? Any thoughts?

Hi Dennis, Quite an interesting take on an older topic. To be honest I'm not aware of anyone who has data on this, but if I come across any I'll be sure to share. I try to look at it from a links prospective and an infrastructure prospective. If the company has the infrastructure to consistanly update independent sites that's awesome. However, how many possible links are they loosing out on by spreading out resources like that? Someone else gave me a google example of companies that have all languages hosted on one site. http://www.apple.com/choose-your-country/ Apple seems to get along just fine. If your company has the infrastructure to have CCTLDs consistently updated yet large companies like Apple do the opposite, I would survey a few large companies and see what they do. If it's good for them, it's probably good for you.

If those directories are the multilingual versions of the same English pages, be sure to use the rel="alternative" hreflang tags. In addition, obtaining links from more local websites would help you rank better in their respective google.tlds Can't really comment on GWT but I don't think you need to do anything fancy. Just make sure you don't have a specific region targeted (i.e. if you target just USA, it would worsen your international rankings).

Hi Greg, Forgot to say thanks! We ended up taking your advice and we've made sure each page uses rel alternate correctly. Took a bit of development time, but I'm sure it's worth it in the end. Cheers, James

Thanks, this is quite helpful. Some of the technical aspects of this are a little beyond my knowledge so any laymen's terms explanation appreciated! However, those articles should help me ask the right questions of our developers to make sure we're doing every correctly.

Heres a good article which may help http://www.hispanicmarketadvisors.com/blog/spanish-seo-domain-per-language-subdomains-or-language-folders

Hey Jeroen, If you are going down the ccTLD route I would host each sites it's respected country, it's possible Google will apply some weight to the geo location of the IP address (you should also set the location in WMT). But more importantly hosting in the same country is going to improve site load times which will help out (a tiny bit atm) with google and improve the user experience. Hosting in another country is not going to get you "penalised" by Google but it's not going to send a signal (from the geo location of the IP address) that you are located in Germany - this may or may not affect your rankings. I recommend you watch this video: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-where-to-host-and-how-to-target-whiteboard-friday Hope that helps... Keith

I would choose the .com and create the /us/ subcarpet (targeting the US via GWT), in order to give to it an initial boost thanks to the authority the .com site already have. I would be sure to pay attention to all the classic issues of International SEO, especially I'd try to avoid duplicated content, and surely will implement the rel="alternate" hreflang="x" in order to avoid as much as I can to see ranking the UK version of the site in the US.

Hi Nakul, thanks for your feedback. What about the markup for multilingual content that could be used to indicate that the product-page with prices in GBP (at a certain URL) is the sister of the same product-page with prices in USD (at a different URL)? Wouldn't it help to get more "regional" traffic from Google? Thanks.

By different domains I'm assuming you're referring to the top level domains (ex: .ca, .co.uk., .gr, etc.) If this is the case, we are NOT doing SEO on multiple domains. The entire global strategy will be on the same ".COM" domain. In other words, each country will have its own sub folder. For example: Canada = http://www.client.com/ca/ United Kingdom = http://www.client.com/ca/ etc. They want to do SEO for 36 countries in one year, but since each country has at least 2 different languages, we're essentially doubling that number to 72 campaigns. Is this safe or are we going to get busted for looking spammy at this level of growth?