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solved via GWT thread: https://groups.google.com/a/googleproductforums.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/WlUzNLFQB54/discussion

Hola, first of all I would consider how strong it is my .ie site. If it is not that strong (i.e.: general rankings, link profile, social presence...), then I would migrate it to the .com domain name. Then, during the migration, I would 301 all the existing URLs of .ie site to their correspondent in .com one, When the .com is set with the country targeted sub carpets, I would specify in Google Webmaster Tools that the subcarpets /ie/, /uk/ and /fr/ are geotargeting Ireland, UK and France (the geolocalization of the .com/ must not be set, if you mean to use it for the global market. Then, I would implement the rel="alternate" hreflang="x" in order to specify that the /ie/ content is meant to be the one to show to user from Ireland, the /uk/ for user from UK and /fr/ to users from France. Finally, in the case the English contents in .com, .com/ie/ and .com/uk/ are identical or substantially identical, I would also set for the /ie/ and /uk/ URLs the .com's URLs as being canonical ones. More infos in these official Google posts here (and maybe more understandable than my answer): Multiregional and multilingual sites > http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=182192 New markup for multilingual content > http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com.es/2011/12/new-markup-for-multilingual-content.html Webmaster Help - rel="alternate" hreflang="x" > http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077

Hi Gianluca, Thanks very much for the helpful response.  I agree with your recommendation, linking building across authoritative sites for each of the languages targeted is probably the best way to approach this. Interestingly, Google Analytics indicates that the vast majority of French (language) visitors are indeed from France, with less than 6% coming from other french speaking countries, so I think it makes sense to register a country top level domain in future to ensure the best chance at competitive visibility here (and in the UK, US). What you've written about Yandex is very interesting.  I myself am new to global SEO so will be doing research.  I will also email seomoz to see exactly how best to handle the subfolders. Thanks again!

I think there may be an important distinction here - are you talking about potentially registering dozens of domains to rank for long-tail phrases? I think we're all assuming that you mean your primary domain choice. Registering dozens of exact-match domains to rank for long-tail phrases is a lot less effective than it used to be (and will probably get even less effecting over the next 1-3 years). People abused that tactic, for starters, but it also splits your link-juice, social signals, and typically creates either doorway pages or large-scale duplicate content. The negatives outweigh the positives in most cases. If you're only talking about one domain, and it really is a very long-tail phrase you want to target, then that's a bit different. In the example you give, most of the keywords are very common and a bit ambiguous, so you're right - a short version might not make much sense. On the other hand, the long version is going to target one very specific phrase that probably gets a small amount of traffic. You could target that phrase through on-page cues, inbound anchor text, etc. (the domain name is just one small piece of the puzzle).

Thanks again you've been great!

Thank you Alan!; I will try it out.

Hi Kandice, Check out https://seogadget.co.uk/inspiring-sitemap-diagrams/ There are some fantastic tools listed on there. Though I know all of them require a fair bit of work to get exactly what you want. Visio is impressive, though not online (nor free!), but it is fairly straight forward to produce good looking visual sitemaps, it'll even connect straight to the site, suck in the sitemap.xml and then plot it for you. Happy reading! Regards Aran

Super answers, very helpful  Thank you

What Highland said, but also ... If you add a langage element, make it a crawlable parameter. You want to be able to tell the search engines that those parameters mean language. This is possible in webmaster tools. Also worth noting is that if a site is translated, it does not mean it is internationally targeted. Not everyone that speaks spanish lives in Spain. Just keep that in mind. Starting with translation is best, but do not think that translating means that you are targeting different countries. More work needs to be done there. Many sites do fine having one site (.com) and translating into the most popular langages. Due to their global nature, their site ranks fine without country targeting. It's up to your market to determine what is best and if country targeting is necessary.

Best practics: 1. Use different content on both the NZ and AU website. 2. Target links from the NZ websites for the NZ. 3. Try to host locally for the NZ site (not a huge concern) 4. GEO target the .nz domain in Google web master tools. 5. Use GEO specific locations, addresses and contact info on the NZ site.

I check the Webmasters Tools and everything is correct. The geo targeting is for Brazil. Thank you.

Yes, maybe in the case of a hotel name.  But for Chinese language, they translate the word for example "London Hotels" to their equivalent. So for area pages it might be worthwhile.  Other top ranking companies e.g TripAdvisor do not translate the folder name at all. Just change the domain TLD. Thoughts ?

I would be quite wary of this for another reason... You may be getting a better Click Thru Rate than you realise - thanks to the .co.uk - which you will lose if you switch to a .com Perhaps try testing adwords with .co.uk versus .com and see if there is a difference.

Hi, James We'll try to make more local contents to our websites. Thank you for your advice!

That all sounds about right. Google will try it's best to deliver to the user what Google thinks the user is searching for since that will keep them as a customer. Assuming you can do it with accuracy it is better to aim for what the user was intending rather than what their actions depict. You really should just hire a mind reader