Multinational Sites - The main SEO issues

[cottamg]

I currently work for the UK arm of a Company with headquarters in Germany - The have outlets in half-a-dozen European countries, and up until now each country has had it's own website.

The group has decided that from next year they will close all the individual country sites and then run new sites each from a central .location, I guess with a shared database of products. I see the sense in having central stock control etc, but I'm worried about the SEO impact.

I have searched Q&A and the blog but could not find much to help me.

What I would like to do is to provide some advice and pointers at to what they should be aiming for, both in terms website structure and on-going SEO for each country.

Any advice welcome, thanks in advance.

[benjaminspak]

Keeping them separate is best practices, however seeing as it is not an option, the next best thing is to put different langues on their own sub-domain.

For example:

• de.examplesite.com
• es.examplesite.com
• fr.examplesite.com

So you'd need to migrate and 301 all of the old site's content to a new subdomain on the central site.

[AndyMacLean]

Heres a good article which may help http://www.hispanicmarketadvisors.com/blog/spanish-seo-domain-per-language-subdomains-or-language-folders