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Hi Mark, thanks a lot for very informative reply. Definitely my strategy is going to put unique, related & fresh content on primary site but want to use this international domain as a traffic source since it will come up in organic searches easily. Content of both sites will be in Farsi forever so actually I don't/won't have international content to focus on each market individually. However just a quick question about your coca cola example: is it possible to set a canonical tag in gateway (international) sites to refer to main website (English coca cola). Does it help with giving all credits & scores to our main site? Thanks for your time

Thanks so much Gianluca, v comprehensive. I've decided to go for ourdomain.com/es/ as a solution for spanish speakers and i'll be sure to use rel=”alternate”hreflang=”x”.

Optimal as you mention is a country specific domain, each hosted on a server in that country and you go into Google Webmaster tools and designating the country for that site. Take a look at what Google states http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=182192 Even though you could setup one site and then setup the different country sections under different subdomains etc, it seems like they are suggesting having domain specific sites is the best option. I think if you show them that "This is what Google suggests", that should bear some weight. All that aside, the strongest argument comes from the user side of things.  If I am an american, will I go to a site from Spain to find what I need.  Probably not.  Unless they have customers who expect to visit a site in Spain to get a product, the separate TLD would make sense.

We now removed all 301 after 2,5 weeks and replaced them with a custom 404 page. Only the most important pages are now redirected. But i guess something happened already. The .com version is very badly indexed, and it shouldn`t because we directed the 2 most important old webshops to this domain. All other versions, like the .nl and .de etc. are doing fine.

Hi Robert Thanks for the feedback, and im glad you like the sites Matthew

Hi Bob Have you seen this answer to a similar question by Gianluca posted this year - http://www.seomoz.org/q/duplicate-content-on-multinational-sites I was going to give you some input on this but who better to answer this... I have a website with two ccTLD that have the same content but are targeting their own countries - I haven't found issues with ranking myself and I think Google recognises that they are sites for the same country working in different markets and so are less bothered about duplicate content in my opinion.

I find that it's better to tell Google it exists, but still let them find it. The best way to accomplish this is to push out an announcement on social bookmarking sites like Digg, Delicious, Reddit, etc. saying "Client A is proud to announce their newly released Japanese language site at http://ja.amdocs.com." That's the quickest way. Google visits the bookmarking sites on a daily basis and when they do, the spiders will crawl those links and then index your newly posted sites. We've used this tactic to achieve indexing in under 48 hours in the past.

Well at least doing it with WMT the way I and Rob explained you got the piece of mind your doing it the right way, the way other SEO's would do it. I don't think implementing the above will be like flicking a switch on the SERP's but only time will tell. Don't forget to setup separate xml sitemaps for each subdomain and put them into the relevant subdomains WMT's account. I'm guessing if your doing subdomains the company has physical address in the locations, if so maybe worth applying for Google places for each one.

EGOL's right - SEO decisions should NEVER determine business policy. Always the other way around. SEO research might help to provide some data about potential market size and possible level of competition for the different choices, but such data should only be used as part of the decision-making process. Paul

Thanks all very much for your help - great advice. D

Thank you for your response! With Austrian/German IP I mean, that we planed to redirect the user IP wise. So if anybody comes to the site with an ip from Austria he should be redirected to the /at site If anybody comes to the site with an ip from Germany he should be redirected to the /de site Data comes from GeoIP Database. So you'r saying, that we don't need a main Home Site? How do the crawler know where to go? Best case would be to have domain.com/AT/ indexed in Google.at and domain.com/DE/ indexed in Google.de a) Language Meta would be the same for /AT and /DE because the language is german in both countries. b) Will check how this works c) What do you mean with update the content to mention the country and location? Content wise there won't be much difference. That's why im concerned about DC. The difference would be some headlines and the terms of delivery!

Hi Gordon, As Paul mentioned, we do have a large number of country specific search engines that you can use to track keywords in other languages. However, we do have some encoding issues with non-Latin character sets. We have had complaints about Katakana, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic, and some others character sets. As of now, it only affects specific characters, so we still support those languages sets in our tools. Our engineers are looking at instances of this issue in depth and trying to push out a fix. We hope to be able to support all non-Latin characters soon. As of now there is no ETA on a fix for this, but we will update you here when we do have the issue figured out. If you have any other questions about this issue, you can also write into us at help@seomoz.org. Best of luck, Chiaryn

Yes I have now verified that the account is through Escrow and typed in the domain myself and not used the link within the e-mail. So it looks like it is an above board sale but I am still not sure re the transfer process I suspect we need to arrange hosting I have asked to see the certificate of domain registration that you would normally receive when purchasing but looking up the domain itself under who is hasnt really shed any light.

Ah, I see where you are coming from. There is room to manoeuvre with multi-national domains (.net etc), however it's when you go into specific country TLD's that you will struggle to pull UK rank. I guess it depends how big a part of your marketing plan SEO is. Like I mentioned, it's certainly possible to rank one of these domains, but it is a uphill battle and if you're relying on SEO for income then I'd  recommend against. From a branding perspective, I can see the potential benefit of one of these domains. Thanks, David

Actually, the problem is that Google.co.uk tends to default the user to the keyword "Global" as if Globak is just a mispelling. My guess is the majority of the people searching for Globak actually intended to search for Global, and Google automatically fixes it for them.

In case anyone is interested or has a similar issue in the future, I did some further research on this and have come to the conclusion that: 1. You can specify multiple alternate tags per page 2. However, you should only define one language per targeted page So, in this case the US site will be targeted with and the 'everything else' site will be best served using the generic english tag of 'en' Resource: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077