Multiple site in one? Recommendations?

[brantwadz]

I have 2 companies that essential do the same thing. They have different names and different domain names.  One is a USA company and the other is a South American Company.

My intnent was to create a single site with both english and spanish content and then create a english home page and a spanish homepage.  I was hoping to direct the spanish domain name to the spanish homepage and the english to the english homepage.

This way I will only have one site to maintain  - one ecommerce site to maintain and can direct teh links to a single site - although they will essentially be kinda different.

My question is... what are the pluses and minuses of doing this?  Would I better creating 2 separate sites? is there going to be an issue with google maybe seeing duplicate content although the pages are seperate for each language?

Any other considerations that I just wasnt smart enough to think of?

[SteveGerencser]

If the content is identical the issue is more of a multiple language and duplicate content issue than a location issue. The only time I would consider unique websites is when you offer different products to different locations.

The biggest pros are that you can build and maintain just one website and point all of your marketing at a single domain. This has the side benefit of having each language support the other through your internal linking. If you do 100% of your SEO/link building in English you will still get some carry over to the Spanish side because of this, and vice versa.

By having a single domain with an /en and a /sp (or whatever) folder you won't have to worry about Google being confused since they handle that fairly well. They handle en.domain.com and sp.domain.com slightly less well.

There are some very minor cons, but not enough to worry about IMO.

[brantwadz]

the main problem is that the companies have differnt name and therefore different domain names, but will both point to the same site, but different landing page.  The content is different on both sites (one spanish and one english).

[SteveGerencser]

Then you get to double your workload. Two domains, two shopping carts, different and unique product descriptions and titles.

Depending how just how talented your it/dev staff is, you 'could' serve the entire product line from a single database to both domains. We've done that in the past on a few projects. but it requires someone that knows what they are doing to get it right.