Use country-specific domains or stick to already strong .com domain?

[1200wd]

We run an online store with the majority of our customers coming from 4 different European countries. The site is accessible through TLD's of all of these countries. However our .com domain currently has the most links pointing to it and the highest domain authority.

Unfortunately, we are unable to tell through which TLD visitors reach our site. The niche is rather competetive, and therefore I am unsure whether it would be worth it to solely use our .com domain for the English language, and try to rank for each of the seperate languages with its own country-specific domain.

**Question/discussion: **Will it be worth the costs and time to spent to build links for the country specific domains in these countries, or should we focus on making our .com domain stronger and use it for all countries? I'm aware of the benefits of ranking with a domain in the country the user is in.

Note: We have major duplicate content issues at this moment, due the content being available in different languages, on a handful of domains. On each domain, users can view the site in different languages. In addition, the language indication in the url is not very clear (?lang=x) so I believe this should be improved to make it easier for search engines to tell which language is presented.

If I choose to use a different language for each TLD, then the language flag in the navigation on the site will point to a different domain, so each language is hosted on 1 domain and there is no more duplicate content. However, I'm afraid this will lead to lower rankings, as the (strong) .com domain will no longer host the content in different languages.

[irvingw]

So you have four different sites, on different TLDs? Basically clones of each other? That's not the way to go - basically you can do two things:

a) Use only the .COM domain and Geo-Target the different language/country folders in Google Webmaster Tools. (my recommendation) or

b) Have your four different TLD's each with unique content. This is more work and more maintenance, and no longer the preferred strategy now that Google Webmaster Tools lets you assign different directories for your .com to different regions. Also, if the languages are different, such as French, German Etc Google knows already by virtue of the language which Google.xx engine to show those results in.

[1200wd]

Thanks for your answer vitalscom.

I was planning to go with using a different TLD (and unique, language-specific content) for each language - as I believed this to be the preferred strategy. I wasn't aware of the change in GWT that you mentioned. I was under the impression that there's an advantage when trying to rank in countries with the TLD of that specific country.