Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks for the quick response! I take your point on board, it certainly sounds valid. The site has been internationalised, so there is an English version among others, so anyone searching for English words should find the English version before say, the Spanish. These characters are also only on a few pages, so further down the hierarchy. The SEOMoz web crawl came back showing these pages as 404's, but the likes of "Screaming Frog" came back with response code 200's. Thanks again, Stuart

Thanks for taking the time to reply Hannah, and for some solutions. I'm investigating them some more... Cheers, Philip.

would recommend using a .com domain or a sub-folder like www.yousite/com/jp. The reason being that .asia domain name, although being regional top level domain (rTLD), Google treats it as generic top-level domain. You can verify it here https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1347922 Regards

Once you do this its worth looking into Google's new HREFLANG tag which they announced in December 2011. Its worth reading this example as John Doherty has done some testing (even though I can't see it in his source code). You'll still want a non county specific domain such as .com as Mozo suggested. I'll be implementing HREFLANG into my sites this year, it'll be interesting to see the results.

Hi Gary, Yes it will overwrite it. We have had clients with same situation and it has worked fine. Greetings, Istvan

Thanks Jane, that's a great help!

thanks, I want to know which tools is better to watch backlink  except OST ?

YEs, thanks, they are all in the same account but different webmaster tools.

Thank you! So, considering the new google markup, I think it shoul be right: us.web.com/en for US users in English web.com/en for everyone else in English web.com/es for everyone in Spanish

Well put Gianluca, I always appreciate your input.

The good think about using TLD's likee .com.uk  or .com.au is that you dont need to worry about duplicate content, Matt Cutts has said as much. But if you cant do that . i would look at this page http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/12/new-markup-for-multilingual-content.html

Excellent question Socialdude. So, First we tackle 301 from example.ie to example.com or example.com/ie. My first inclination is to do the redirect to the .com/ie due to the likelihood of url to url content being more similar. The argument could be that since .com is domain you should redirect to root domain as opposed to sub directory. I am still inclined to go to .com/ie as I believe this will still ultimately impact the root domain. Next, since you will want pages to rank in respective SE's in each country, I would want links going to sub directories as much as possible. So, to improve fr, I need links to fr pages, etc. I look forward to others opinions on this. Best

It does have endpoints in asia, I am not sure that the cdn is free, but it will only cost you a few cents to test if not. Its very cheap for cdn.

Yes that would certainly help. you could also duplcate the sites, one on a .com and the other on a .co.uk, you will not have to worriy about duplicate content when on different TLDS. See matt cutts video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ets7nHOV1Yo change curency and date formats to match

I would say that you should first try to do this without building out a .fr domain. In your position, and with some experience of this already under my belt, I would look to build pages relevant to France in a /fr folder, and use Webmaster Tools to inform Google that this is where the geographical target for that folder is. There are many other things to think about, just a few of them are; 1. Filtering of results by the user will have an impact i.e. the search for sites in French/ search for sites in France choice that users will asked to make. It's great that the site shows up in your tests, but maybe it would disappear to some users if it's not hosted in France? 2. You could still buy an appropriate .fr domain, build out a little relevant content hosted in France, link to this from your obviously reasonably authoritative main site and see if you can start to get the new domain to rank and "fill in the blanks". 3. You don't say if you translated the key phrase you used, and I'm assuming translation would be relevant. If it is, and excuse me if this is obvious, you'll need to do all of your keyword research again. Just translating from say, English probably won't cut the mustard. I seem to recall there was a Whiteboard Friday on this topic quite recently, you should look that up.

Perhaps you are right about the links but it feels strange that we have dropped that far down in that case. We have around PA 57 and DA 48 with almost 250 root domains linking which is quite high comparing to the competitors. Even though some of the links got devaluated, we shouldn't drop 100-200 places for many of our more difficult keywords. I will continue working with the links, and go through the onpage seo to see if I can turn things around. Would be sad to let the site go.