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Hi Jason, Personally I would go with a .com or other generic TLD, however this is more from a user experience perspective than anything else. I'd suggest that if you're targeting Spanish speakers internationally they'll all be equally likely to click through and transact with a .com - whereas a .es may affect click through and conversion rates in say Mexico. By way of reassurance re generic TLD versus ccTLD, I've not personally seen any evidence to suggest that a .es will rank better in Spain than a .com - (i.e. I don't think that using a generic TLD like a .com will hamper your SEO efforts at all). I hope this helps, Hannah

With regards to geotargeting, server location is irrelevant if you have the top-level domain - Google say so themselves (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/03/working-with-multi-regional-websites.html) - and there are plenty of UK businesses that successfully use a .com or other international domain, so a UK product doesn't have to belong on a .co.uk. Links (follow, at least) pass juice whatever country they're from, so having 100 US-based links will still help the overall authority of a website whether it's hosted in the UK, France, or anywhere. Are you saying the thousands of foreign links SEOmoz has, or the BBC, for example, don't help them rank so highly worldwide? Yes, country specific links are very useful to rank in that country, but other links help too. I think Rand mentions this as a pro in the video from the link in my previous post. There are plenty of companies who struggle to maintain one website, without even thinking about link building, so it's definitely a valid reason to consider keeping the one website. It is important to get it right first time. Weighing up the pros and cons can depend on a number of factors we haven't even mentioned, such as whether the site is e-commerce or not, for example. E.g. if someone from France sees a .it in the SERPs they might not click the link if other .fr links are there, due to the increased chance a .it might not ship to France.

Thanks Jane - much appreciated. I think we will bring our .co.nz into the .com under a new sub folder, wait  and see what the results are and then base a decision off that for our .co.uk - have a great holidays and thanks once again.

Bummer Wish you luck, though!

No answers, but I found the answer to this offline. Thought I would note it here for those of you who are interested. 1. In terms of Amazon cloud hosting they have datacentres in specific locations so there is (probably) no worry about losing any gains from localised hosting. Assuming they have a datacentre in the region you need. 2. Related is something I have just learned about is Amazon Cloud Front, a content distribution network in which your content is delivered to a location near to where it is requested from. The main advantage is low latency high speed content delivery but there may be SEO localisation implications

nocando as far as i know. you might be ranking in G-news US if the content is relevant locally. When submitting your site go G-News you can chose some local preferences. These will matter (as well as location of servers). If you're not based in the US, you should still be able to rank with relevant articles, though the competition is definitely tougher there than in the UK. I have similiar issues with Germany and Switzerland (both in German): Lots of German sites can rank in G-News Switzerland. Swiss pages have a harder time to rank in Germany (probably due to harder competition and better-linked sites in Germany) - but they do appear, when relevant.

Hey Antonio, Maybe I'm missing something, but I only found one issue. You want to 301 redirect www.solmelia.es to es.solmelia.com. A 301 is a permanent redirect which will pass on your link juice and tell Google that this it the new page and the old one is no more. The guide I linked to gives tips on how to do it in various platforms, but most people use their robots.txt to do this.

Well, even the Moz staff/associates don't seem to be agreeing on this one - it's definitely an unusual situation. There were some calls to try a .ca domain, but since you see so many .com's ranking, we're not sure that's going to have much of an impact. Part of the problem is that real estate is a really competitive market for SEO, and many of the agents targeting Phoenix-related properties will also be local. My guts says that, if your client can only take on Canadian customers, then push the Canadian "local" signals hard, and don't worry about the Phoenix signals as much (except for content and keyword targeting).

Thanks Kent for your help before - yeah probably just coincidence - we had managed to remove some bad neighbourhood links and rewritten our content before we realised the currency display issue and changed that

If you are signed in to Google clear the history for that account. You can also change the location you are in so it displays the listings by location

Its a interesting situation which we will test. we are sectioning off the sites for the language, but i think its a interesting problem around language. Thanks for your time guys!

Thanks Marcus, we're not persuaded either way on the .jp site or /jp approach yet. Just looking at the options since the product being launched is targeted at Japan, but other products are not. Yep, been through that WBF. As I understand it, in rough terms, Bing seems to lean more heavily on keywrds on-page (esp. titles) than Google - I was really wondering if there are any similar 'preferences' that engines serving Japanese-language sites exhibit. Perhaps I'm over-analysing this and should (as I think you've been hinting at) focus more on the basics and targeting of visitors than worrying about the subtleties

I apologize for #3 completely unrelated advice. Ill edit it in regards to your last comment I would say be careful with duplicate content that is available to the google crawlers, blocking them is not recommended any longer and they will choose one version to index as opposed to all version on all sites. You (perhaps) could change the content to include the keywords but be re-written. I am sure this is a huge undertaking, and my experience is with the same content translated, not the same content posted to different CCTLD's. Ive done a really quick search for HP Computers in the UK, USA, and New Zealand. Here are the results: 1. US: http://welcome.hp.com/country/us/en/prodserv/computers.html 2. UK: http://www8.hp.com/uk/en/home.html 3.  NZ: http://www8.hp.com/nz/en/home.html while the UK and NZ share a very similar result (essentially no content and the same title tag + the country) the USA returns a different result, it brings us right to the product page with lots of content. It appears that they have mastered the art of making very similar content appear fresh to the crawlers while providing a very similar and regional user experience.