Hi,

I'm interested to get some opinions on what people think is better to use for URLs across different countries please, either:

• Subdomains such as:
  uk.brand.com / fr.brand.com / de.brand.com

  Or

• ccTLDs such as:
  brand.co.uk / brand.fr / brand.de

I'd really like to consider this from a few different angles including Branding, SEO and any other contributing benefits of either method?

Thanks very much

I think the big question is around the nature of the business and proposition to the customer across the markets. For example, will the businesses operate effectively separately in each market? How much of the proposition is 'global' versus entirely local? Will you have different language versions for each site and completely different sites in time? 

The more separate the businesses and customer propositions are, the more likely you should have country level TLDs with local language content etc. Effectively they are then completely separate sites and, from an SEO point of view, would stand alone and rank / be optimised separately. 

We're all assuming that the original poster already owns the ccTLDs in each of his/her target markets. This is not always the case.

I agree that a ccTLD strategy can work very well, for the points raised above, but I don't think there is anything overtly negative about a subdomain strategy if it is well planned. Subdomains can be hosted in the individual countries and can also be configured seperately in Google's Webmaster Tools to inform G of where you'd like traffic from.

Another interesting point to think about is what to do in countries where more than one language is spoken. Which language would brand.be be written in? Belgians speak French or Dutch (and German to a lesser extent) depending on where you are in the country. A similar situation exists in Switzerland. What would you do? If you had Dutch language literature on your Belgian domain, would the two versions be suitably different to avoid be labelled as duplicate content in the eyes of Google?

Couldn't you have a subdomain strategy whereby your subdomains were targetted by language rather than by geographical location? nl.brand.com could be your Dutch language site and you could link to it (the subdomain) directly from other Dutch language sites, thus increasing its relevance for Dutch language keywords. Certainly food for thought, but's a tricky one!

Another point to think about is whether the brand name is actually relevant in each country. The 1800flowers.com brand will mean very little to the average Brit, for example.

...could the subdomain set up using webmaster tools make the issue with multiple language countries worse?

Quite possibly Miles! :-)

I'm not an SEO, and don't pretend to be, so was thinking of additional considerations that the original poster might need to think about.

You are right though, perhaps the 'WMT-geo-targetting-strategy' and the 'tailor-sub-domain-by-language-instead-of-location-strategy' might not be the best bed-fellows.

What would be your number one strategy for promoting a site to Belgian or Swiss users (without a .ch or .be domain - that's cheating! :-))?

Brian I missed your point, without using a .ch or .be domain!

Well that's probably more tricky - I would say using a .com domain with a fr. or vlaams. subdomain, and just rely on language auto detection to match whatever preferences they have set. This would work worldwide too, but I think it would be harder to rank well and would stand out less in SERPs.