Good Day All,

Heres the full story/picture and maybe someone can shed some light for me.

We have many domains covering many countries. I understand now what needs to be done for our .co.uk domain, but I'm still abit confused in terms of our French, Italy, Japan and German brands/websites.

All the international websites(excluding .co.uk) are all subdomains of the main property. For example;

www.abc.com (MAIN PROPERTY)
www.abc.co.uk (UK MAIN PROPERTY)

france.abc.com
italia.abc.com
deutsch.abc.com
japan.abd.com

All the subdomains link off our main property using a javascript so the engines don't think we are corsslinking (which we arent).

Now my question is my feeling is its better if we want to target international flavours, it would be best for us to setup www.franceabc.fr, www.italiaabc.il, www.deutschabc.gr etc..? Is this best?

Cheers

Critter

Hi Critter!

I would use both. I'm sure that as a practical matter the IT dept would like to keep whatever scheme they have (such is an SEO's life) :(

So let them keep their scheme.

Here is a good method:

1. make sure that all the sub domains are on their own IP addresses.

2. Register the country TLD's for them and assign the CC TLD to the appropriate subs

3. Then 301 the current scheme to the appropriate sub.

Link the same way.

Here is an example: make a new site with a new IP. point abcfrance.fr at it. Then 301 france.abc.com to abcfrance.fr.

Now what will happen is that every single time someone links to france.abc.com in any way, the search engine will be told that this is actually abcfrance.fr and therefore a french site.

There are several other methods, but this will probably cause the least amount of havoc among the IT people :)

Cheers,

Ian

Excuse my ignorance

TLD - Top Level Domain

CC - ???

Cheers

Critter

oops, sorry! :o

CC TLD = Country Code Top Level Domain (ie .fr or .co.uk, but not .net or .xxx)

Also spelled ccTLD

Ian