Sub-Domains??

[critter]

Good Day All,

Quick question about sub-domains.

I have built my new site, www.abc.com. We are looking to offer variations of the website in a few different languages(Italian, French, German & Spanish).

I was thinking about setting up sub-domains for these languages within my site as follows;

italia.abc.com
france.abc.com
deutsch.abc.com
espana.abc.com

My question is, while setting up these sub-domains is it better to make each of them a unique IP? Will this benefit SEO or actually hurt the whole process. Would it just be better to have the sub-domains fall unde the same IP as the TLD?

It can be very difficult to get domains in some of thse countries, as well as we don't want our users leaving our site once they arrive, which is why we are thinking sub-domains rather then building new domains for each multilingual brand.

My intent is not to use these dub-domains for any kind of spam, rather to place translated versions of the website on the appropriate sub-domain so we can offer our services to those European markets.

Cheers

Critter

[Kal]

There are lots of ways to do this and you need to work out the way that best suits you. Consider these issues:

1) cost of hosting multiple domains
2) cost of managing and updating multiple domains
3) advantages of purchasing the country TLDs for each target language
4) cost of 3)
5) possible link popularity dilution if content is spread across multiple domains
6) ease content management for a single vs multiple domains
7) some regional search engines will only accept sites with country specific TLDs, regardless of language

good luck!