Multiple Region/Language Solutions

[DRSearchEngOpt]

So I understand that this is a fairly broad question but I am trying to work through this on a bunch of different levels with a bunch of different sites that have multiple different issues.

First I am wondering if I have an e-commerce site on a .com that is used to serve to different languages and locales around the world.  Instead of a Domain.com/ES/ for a site that is supposed to serve Spain and a Domain.com/DE/ for a site that is supposed to serve Germany, we do Domain.com/en_ES/ and Domain.com/es_ES/ for an English and a Spanish version for our consumers that come from Spain.

My first question is this a bad way to set this up just from a structure standpoint and my second question is what do I do about duplicate content on different locales but same languages?  I am afraid that if I rel=canonical this to 1 region for each language that it may not show up in SE's for other regions but the same language.  (Example Brazil and Portugal for Portuguese, Belgium and Netherlands for Dutch, Canada and France for French, Spain and Mexico for Spanish, etc...)

Second do the language meta tags actually do anything or not?  I am finding mixed opinions on this.

Third what is the IDEAL website structure for a website that will serve multiple languages and locales from the same ccTLD?  I understand this is not ideal but what is the best setup with this situation?

Again I know this is a broad question but I am coming across a lot of e-commerce sites wanting help and dealing with this situation.  The duplicate content thing is worrisome and I want good, localized indexing.

Thanks!

[john4math]

First, the site structure you're proposing sounds fine.  The shorter URLs with just the country code look better to me, but I'd lowercase the country codes.

Second, there are a few things you can do to make sure the search engines are doing the right thing with respect to content for different countries.  You can set you location target for each directory within Google Webmaster Tools in Site configuration > Settings.  You can also set language metadata, or set HTTP headers to clue in Bing as to what language and country the page is targeting (see http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive/2011/03/01/how-to-tell-bing-your-website-s-country-and-language.aspx).

Even though these are targeted to different countries, they show up to the search engines as duplicate content since the content is so similar, and until recently there wasn't much that could be done about it.  You could either rel=canonical to the page that caters to your main audience, or just accept that there would be some duplicate content.  Google recently announced support for a rel=alternate tag which should help to mitigate this.  You can read more about it here: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/12/new-markup-for-multilingual-content.html.  The tl;dr of this is you can set rel=alternate tags to signal which pages are alternates of each other, and rel=canonical to one preferred version.  When this page would come up in search, it'll use the title and description from the preferred page, but if the searcher is in a country where you have an alternate version, it'll use the URL for the alternate page.  It's not perfect, but at least it's a step in the right direction.