Subdomain or subfolder for each country

[AndersDK]

Hi all

I have a great .com domain but the cctlds are not available so I plan on using the .com for all the countries and languages.

What is the best approach for SEO: subdomains like wikipedia does (de.greatdomain.com)  or subfolders (greatdomain.com/de)?

I know this question comes up frequently on other websites but I would like to hear the Moz forum.

[GPainter]

First off: did you try using the search function there are oodles of similar topics on Moz and you are bound to find something relevant.

http://moz.com/community/q/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&query=+subdomain+or+subfolder+for+each+country+&commit=Search

In the Google's blog post about language mark up ( http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/new-markup-for-multilingual-content.html ) they uses sub domains for an example which I would also recommend as you can really target it a bit more where as a sub folder you would have a mix of languages. However you can still use the mark up if you did want to use folders.

Hope some of that helps, good luck!