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Actually you do not necessarily need to redirect. Hiring a new domain, hosting in the target country, giving the distribution meta is the most you can do. If you purchase a .fr or a .co.uk domain and you completely redirect it to the .com than it is pointless in my opinion as french content will never show up on the .fr domain and so with the .co.uk one. I am optimising for Hungary, when my keywords are not available with a .hu tld I often use .com or .info. I do not host my sites in Hungary. The language of the content and the links from Hungarian pages are enough but do note that we do not have a solid culture on internet, so reaching a position in the UK or France may be much harder. Maybe if you have a site with a lot of backlins simply having a separate folder for the french content is enough. I can not help you to decide whether to put a .fr to the end of the url, or to use a different sub like fr.site.com. Wikipedia uses the second so I prefer that maybe they are doing something right.

Antonio, For work load and ease of change, I'd edit your robots.txt. Sometimes, search engines will still show the empty page in search results with only the URL if you don't put in a nofollow meta tag, but most of them should obey the robots.txt commands. Of course, ideally, you'd want your website not to push those "future pages" without content live, but I understand that sometimes there are things that seem easy on a website that aren't. Hope that helps! Erica

Have you set your geo data to Au? see what Matt Cutts (Google) has to say http://www.seorabbit.com/geo-location-and-seo

Hi Denns, Are you talking about cheaper/free geodge? Geoedge already offers some free proxies - though I guess if you want more you'll have to pay. There may be some way to hack something using TOR networks or somesuch, but I've not investigated those - and the effort involved strikes me as way over the top to do something like that.

Hi Antonio, Just make sure to keep it consistent within markets and languages, at this moment you have to make a decision for your global domain structure and that depends on your marketing/business strategy and technology capabilities. I'll use Canada as an example of URLs I have seen: www.domain.ca (EN content) www.domain.ca/fr (FR-ca Content) www.domain.com/fr-ca/ (FR-ca content fr.domain.com (FR content) ca.domain.com/fr (FR-ca content) I can keep giving you examples, on how easy is to create a big mess with a global structure. In the case of www.motionpoint.com we use subdomains for languages not for countries, but we keep it consistent for the whole site but Spanish, which we should have ES instead of Espanol. but that will give you the idea. The more clear structure you have the easier is for search engines to relate your content to a language or market. Let me know if this helps. Blas

I see the following results: In google.com.au your site ranks as #1 for "chat online" In google.com your site ranks as #1 for "chat rooms online" In Google.com your site is not in the top 50 results for "chat online". I am physically located in the US. There is a tremendous amount of search results for "chat online" such as businesses with high authority sites inviting customers to chat online, news sites sharing online chats, etc. It seems the removal of the term "rooms" not online takes away the EMD ranking bonus, but opens the search query up to a very wide variety of interpretation. It's interesting because even on the "chat online" search the term "room" is shown in bold so Google understands when a search is performed for "chat online" users are often looking for a chat room. Your page is decently optimized for the term. I am hesitant to suggest any changes as you do rank in the #1 slot for other searches. You also have numerous links to the page using "chat online" as anchor text. It seems this matter requires deeper investigation. A few things I would recommend: 1. You have a serious SEO issue in that your site is available in both www and non-www formats. http://chat-rooms-online.com/ http://www.chat-rooms-online.com/ The above two URLs both work. You should redirect the non-www URL to the www version, and ensure all links use the www version. 2. Your copyright date in the footer is for 2010. I would recommend using php to automatically update the year portion so it shows as Copyright 2010-(current year). 3. Your home page is repeatedly providing a status code of "304 Not Modified". The normal header response for a web page is "200 All Ok". Please check with your web developer or host to determine why the 304 code is being returned.

in IE, press F12 Select network tab, and start capturing

Thanks Alan

Ok. Thanks for the advise, Ryan.

You ask a great question and answers will vary. A .com is recognized and accepted well in all countries. My preference would normally be a single site with a folder for each country. By having one site, you will minimize expenses, coding and gain many efficiencies. You should use Google and Bing WMT to set your target for each section of your site. You should also ensure your country target signals are clear with language meta tags, and proper use of currencies, measurements and language. With that said, if you wanted to go from purely a ranking perspective, several credible people have shared their believe a ccTLD will outperform a .com site with all things being equal. Even if that were true, the loss of domain authority by having your sites divided, combined with other factors makes it most worthwhile to keep the sites together under the .com domain in my opinion. Opposing viewpoints are welcome

Yes but still not as good as promoting the one site. You seem to like the local idea, so go with that, if at some stage you think its the wrong stratigy, you can always stop promoting all, and concentrate on the .com only

Just wanted to let you know that the links that are prompting a download are a bug in OSE and not real links. Check out the post by a Linkscape engineer at http://www.seomoz.org/q/how-are-our-competitors-getting-these-inbound-linking-domains. So sorry for not catching this thread earlier, hope it helps explain some of the problems.

From my opinion the best way to do it and from my experience with this is: 1. Set the .com domain up with content targeting a global audience. 2. Leave the .ca domain up with content targeting the Canadian audience. The .ca domain will rank better in Canadian serps over time. But it comes down to budgets and what you want to do from a resources point of view, If you can not potential run 2 sites then yes do a 301. You would also need to map out the 301's cross site you may loose some anchor text value too. With a 301 re direct you will loose rankings, it may be for a few days or a few weeks but once the uptake happens, in my opinion you may loose some ranks in the .ca rankings if you have competitors with the country level TLD and you now have the .com I have seen it happen time and time again.