Hi,

I've got a product website that I'm launching in the next month or so. I own the com, net, org, ie, co.uk, eu, etc. Initially I'll be launching with .com and trying to build that up.

However, for SEO purposes, I'd be interested in replicating the site over to .ie, .co.uk and eventually .eu (making it multilingual) so that anyone doing UK only, Ireland only, France only, etc searches, we'd also be showing up.

I know that I might hit a wall with duplicate content and I wonder has anyone got any suggestions for how I approach this.

Thanks in advance

Dave

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David Behan
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Some of the international sites I use offer slightly different content depending on which version I go into. So, for example, the UK one would give pricing in Sterling, the US one in dollars etc.,

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You're into the realm of the serious SEO now
IMO keep it all on .com and build a mega site.
Multi country, multi language is seriously tough and requires a deep wallet.
Be interested to hear how you get on.

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Thanks for the comments guys.

I was thinking of the custom currency thing alright but I'd probably need to customise the content so that it wasn't hit as duplicate content. Currently I'm just displaying the price as $99 / €69 / £49 and when ordering you can choose your currency.

I was thinking of just sticking with English but customising the content for Ireland, UK and the US and registering each site in Google Webmaster for each country.

I wasn't going to approach the multi lingual for Europe until the English speaking areas are doing well.

So, if I stick with everything on .com how would I get around someone in the US or the UK doing a country only search and we don't show up as we're registered to Ireland (for example)?

Rgds, Dave

For Google you should be able to do this shortly. They have a new feature which is broken at the minute. It allows you to geotarget gTLD domains, or sub domains / sub directories

I'm going to try to blog about it next week if I find the time.

Bear in mind that the tool seems to be almost Alpha software from Google, but hopefully it should be working in the coming months.

It may be that the others will follow, albeir lagging behind. Actually forget about MS doing this. Maybe Yahoo! though.

Rgds
Richard

The best approach would probably to use the .com with regional subdomains so that the English site would be en.website and the American would be us.website and so forth..

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That new tool is "geographic" so I'd doubt if it's applicable in your scenario, for the English language markets it's still either ccTLds with significantly differing content, or a single .com covering the whole "English" market.

Anyone any idea what percentage of people search within own country only - I have never seen stats for that anywhere.

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Camino de Santiago - DeadFly SEO - West Highland Way - Glendalough - Work in Ireland

First I want to say that I have no actual experience with this so don't take my word for it this is just what I have noticed.

My experience is primarily with Open Source Content management systems. I have noticed that with a couple of them they provide different url's which translate content.

For example:

www.example.com/english.html
www.example.com/french.html
www.example.com/spanish.html

Alternatively I think sub domains would be best as these are often treated as a different website.

en.example.com
fr.example.com
sp.example.com

I know that Drupal (Opensource CMS) has multi lingual features built into it. However I have not explored the options in this at all. Joomla also has various multilingual features but I understand that there are some bugs and issues with these at this time. (As I said I have experience with FREE software and not commercial).

What system as you thinking of using to build you site, if you don't mind me asking?

Plone CMS: Open Source Content Management is another open source cms, however its more commercially focused so chances are they will have a solution to your problem.

Not sure if any of this helps?

From a recent WmW thread:

" I have several hundred .uk sites on US servers........ I checked a whole stack of stats files recently and I found that about 20% seem to use the "UK pages only" function. "

Another thread from 2002 mentions a similar %.......