Ranking Internationally

[jaychristopher]

Whats the best URL strategy to rank for one term in different countries? We currently rank well in Australia, but are tackling many countries over the next few months.

The page I am ranking is http://www.spendbitcoins.com/buy for the term 'buy bitcoins' or 'buy bitcoins in Australia' (replace Australia with each specific country, i.e. New Zealand, Japan, etc.)

These are the strategies I have come up with, is one of these good or is there a different better way?

1. Use country specific TLDs, pulling the content from the same site w/ translations
2. Use country specific TLDs and create separate sites and create completely original content
3. Use country specific TLDs, forwarding to the primary domain
4. use a subdomain from the same site
5. modify the page link to be something like spendbitcoins.com/buy/new-zealand
6. Don't worry about any of this and just get links from sites with the proper TLD

[SEO5Team]

I'd recommend option 4, using a sub domain and specifying the geo target in webmaster tools . I should add that you might have a tough time using this strategy in some countries like Austria and France where country specific TLD's tend to rank better.

Rand covered this topic in one of his whiteboard sessions. Link

[Dr-Pete]

I'm afraid there's no one "right" answer. Country-specific TLDs do have some extra power, but the problem is that then you're splitting everything - content, links, social mentions, etc. If you have the budget to really build up a site and market it in each country, then ccTLDs are great. If you aren't ready to go all-in, though, I'd probably recommend against it.

I generally would not rely on machine translations. They tend to be a poor user experience and Google can often spot them and may consider them to be thin content. A good translation done by a native speaker is perfectly fine. In this case, I'd also use the hreflang tags to let Google know that it's a language/region-specific piece of content:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077

Finally, in most cases I'd recommend sub-folders or sub-domains. Sub-domains may split authority and can act more like separate domains (but without the power of the ccTLD). There are standard practices for sub-folders, like "http://www.sepndbitcoins.com/au" and "/nz" - and this can help Google more easily understand the site structure. If the pages are all in English then I'd definitely recommend hreflang tags - they'll help Google sort out the region-specific content. You can target sub-folders in GWT. See this page for more information:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=182192#2