Country sites - TLD's or sub directories?

[SThreeMarketing]

Dear All,

We have several brands which operate a several languages and currently have a set up like this:

www.[BRAND].com/ = English global

www.[BRAND].com/de = German

www.[BRAND].com/fr = French

…

Each subdirectory is a completely different site so I was wondering would it be better to use TLD’s for each country site in order to hold more equity in the search engine if we used:

www.[BRAND].com/ = English global

www.[BRAND].de = German

www.[BRAND].fr = French

Are country top level domains the way to go? If we wanted to change language within a country site should we use the following?

www.[BRAND].be = Belgium English

www.[BRAND].be/nl-NL/ = Belgium Dutch

If you could let me know what to do I would be most grateful.

Thanks guy's

Ian Leggett

UI Developer

[GPainter]

Hi there,

First off this sounds perfect for what you want to know - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

Now as for TLD's etc. its preference - the bonus of having it on one site is all link juice accumulated goes to one domain rather then trying to optimize 3-4 different sites. You can always secure the TLD and if you need to move the site across at a later date. Whilst a regional TLD does give a minor boost it wouldn't mean much if you've spread yourself too thin across a few sites to really help the site rank.

My recommendation would be get your main site working with the rel=alternative tag in place for sub folders then you can work on moving one language to a new site (e.g. .de) get that site working really well then move onto another site etc. if you want to do that.

Hope that helps.

[SThreeMarketing]

Thank you very much for such a prompt response. This is a lot of help.

Thanks

Ian