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Thanks guys really appreciate the advice. We've decided to buy the CCTLDs and hold them (to avoid anyone else from taking them) but we're going to move ahead and follow your suggestions of using HREFLANG.

I have always used WordPress for websites because the ease of SEO implementation. Has always performed to my liking as well. I haven't used Joomla much but I know people that claim the same.. "More Functionality" I am almost certain that the same level of SEO techniques or Changes can be utilized on both CMS platforms.

Google GeoIP and you should get lots of info and resources. Maxmind, countryipblock, etc. Keep in mind, that by doing this you could also block those from India you are farming work out to.

My company, Virante, studied this question about a year and a half ago. It appears that string distance measurements like Levenshtein Distance or Jaro Winkler Distance correlate well with rankings - this means that it might be nice to have ikeyword.com or ekeyword.com, but not keyword1keyword2.com. You quickly start to lose value at that point. My vote for them would be to build a brand in this case, unless they can get a true EMD.

Thanks for your response Ryan, I totally agree that the tools you use don't necessarily make you an SEO, it's how you use them that matters. With regards to Woorank I've only used the free version and I agree it's buggy but there's a lot of potential there. Thumbs up for your response pal.

So glad I could help sort things out!

Joomla has all those features included in its core but if you want greater flexibility over what content you want public and what you want private (requires visitors to sign-up/login to view), you may want to check out this extension. There are a few Wordpress plugins that cater for what you're after - but again, included in the core is memberships, sign-up/login functions so not really sure exactly what you're after but here are some resources that will likely come in useful for you. http://buddypress.org/ http://ntt.cc/2009/10/13/25-excellent-social-networking-plugins-for-wordpress.html

Actually what Russ said is correct. European countries languages, although largely stemming from three different roots (german, latin and slavic), are quite similar in how they work semantically. In fact, the problems Google may have are related to not European languages, like chinese, japanes or arabic, which are completely different in how they are conceived (just think to chinese or japanes, which are ideograms based). That's also one of the reasons why it took a long time in its history to present a Google version in those languages. Another thing is if the quality of the regional Googles is high or not, but that could start a long thread

Hi definitely agree with the point you made about marketing. I have always believed that a top notch SEO should have some insight into the workings of marketing in general to better assist a business in making use of the internet to generate sales. I also believe this to be true for PPC managers by the way but more so for SEOs

Hey Shady Similar thing happened to my site over the weekend.  Could be just a local temporary rumble in the search results.  try from your mobile device for a less geo centric search result. I got some great answers here.   http://www.seomoz.org/q/have-we-been-penalised