Restructure of multi-region and multi-lingual site?

[seagreen]

I've read through a lot of material to this point on the subject which has been helpful.  In making a major decision like this I'd love another set(s) of eyes on this.  A lot of the material I read is pretty dated.  Thanks for your help!

Background:  Company is currently maintaining the following sites, some in multiple languages: company.com, company.us, company.de, company.fr, etc. (12 ccTLDs, some multi-lingual).  Each site represents a physical office/distributorship in each location.  Each ccTLD site (and pages) include both duplicate, and unique, localized content (intermixed).  Each country office will be producing content for their ccTLD, though some content will be duplicated from the .com.  In essence, there is a .com corporate site template and the ccTLDs will be customized but include a lot of the content on the .com corporate multi-lingual site.

Some of the ccTLDs rank ok, some don't, all SEO strategy to date has been implemented by independent marketing companies in each country.  I am working on a centralized SEO strategic approach.

Approach:  My initial thought was to leverage the .com domain internationally by consolidating all ccTLDs within the .com site using sub-directories.  Since some regional sites are also multi-lingual, the consolidated site structure might look like this...

company.com/en-us/, company.com/en-de/, company.com/de-de/, company.com/en-fr/, company.com/fr-fr/.  This would allow for location-specific content to be presented in multiple languages.

When I learned how much customization/localization will need to be done (each country maintaining its own blog,etc), and started evaluating things like the length of the urls for marketing purposes, the necessity to have multiple users accessing certain sections of the site, and some insight that the ccTLDs will likely rank better than the consolidated .com, research of other sites (amazon.com has ccTLDs for each country). I began to reconsider my initial strategy, and re-evaluate a .com corporate site in mult-languages with regional ccTLDs with a blend of duplicate and unique content instead.

Beyond business needs, my primary concern is preventing duplicate content.  I can already see issues arising between the .com corporate multi-lingual site in French, for instance, and the company.fr regional site that would contain some of the same corporate content, and a lot of its own unique localized content.  I am imaging the corporate .com actually  having to defer to the ccTLDs via rel=canonical to avoid duplicate content issues which doesn't seem to natural (maybe just in the case where the .com corporate site would use rel=canonical to the .us office site)

I've had a lot of success consolidating sites and working to build a single, strong, trusted, authoritative domain vs. having to build that same authority, in this case, a dozen times with all the ccTLDs.  I am not sure if the ability to leverage a single .com multi-regional/lingual site outweighs the benefit of a ccTLD for a site that operates in a single country.  What do you think?

What solution would you recommend, all things considered?  Please let me know if I am missing something. I enjoyed the challenge of weighing all the factors and am at a point where I could really use some feedback from colleagues.

The developers are building the site(s) in Drupal.

Thanks!

[RyanPurkey]

In the past when I've worked on something similar, having the ccTLD was such a strong factor for the types of business each company was doing locally, that it also was key in assisting conversions, and supporting the local marketing teams. That's one consideration.

Another way I'd look at it is via translation. Pretty much every site can avoid duplicate content if they are always using their localized translated versions of any material originally written by the .com, save for the overlapping English ones. In that regard it's a consideration of either writing different versions or using rel=canonical to point to the site that you want to rank the most for that particular document, again probably a consideration of the region of the article by customer, client, etc, i.e. if it was an article about a UK client or offering than the rel=canonical should point to the UK hosted site. But I'd still consider taking on hires to help with translation and copy writing as there sounds like there could be quite a bit of it.

Going in reverse, you could probably have any English versions hosted on the ccTLDs point back to the .com as canonical. Cheers!