Best Structure for Multi-Language/International Website

[fassnachtp]

We are getting ready to do a total redsign of our website, which is a multi-language global website (www.hurco.com).  Today we use an ip address lookup to determine country of origin and redirect to say hurco.de for Germany.  The main reason for this was that our German division was afraid that their potential customers were going to the hurco.com site and seeing product that was not available to them.

Is there a better way from an SEO standpoint to structure our website?  Should we have all hurco.com traffic goto  a country selection page and let them go there manually?  Other good practices we should follow?  Would you structure the entire site as //www.hurco.com/en-us or /en-canada (language and country) and then have all international domains 301 redirect to the proper one?

[nealdigi]

Hi Phil

From an SEO standpoint and in an ideal world, dealing with localisation issues, it would be preferred to have each country specific site hosted within that particular country. But this throws up additional hosting cost as well as individual link building efforts to each of those domains.

The best way would be to redirect any country specific versions of the domain to the relevant root folder.

For example, if we were to launch hurco in Italy, the preference would be to place the Italian content within a subfolder (i.e. http://www.hurco.com/it/) but also purchase http://www.hurco.it and use a 301 redirect the site to the Italian subfolder. This is done both to preserve your brand assets in other countries and markets, but also to avoid any confusion should a user mistakenly remember your brand but not your site.

The subfolders or portions of the website can be targeted to the local market by way of designation within Google Webmaster Tools.