International / Multilingual SEO
Hey Richard, Sinead and Glengara,
Thanks for the mention Richard - caught it in my referrers!
We have a french and an english version of our site on one domain. I made this decision because I felt it would be better to have all link authority coming into one domain. This should give the site more authority overall.
The next decision is tricky then - how to optimise for regional search (google.ie, google.fr etc...) The three main variables to play with are:
1) In what country the site is hosted (in our case france),
2) The top level domain (in our case .com leaves it open, .fr or .ie would be less so)
3) The country of origin for the links to the site.
Our initial focus was on the French market so we decided to host it in france (which has been an absolute nightmare...) We then decided we wanted an international tld (.com) because we weren't aiming at one single market. Links so far have mostly been from french sites.
So far looking at our stats, most search traffic coming to the french site is from google.fr and google.ca. And most traffic coming to the english site is from english language google or other international versions. So that's working well.
Just really starting to work promoting the english side of the site. So we'll see how that goes with a french host.
On multi-lingual pages, Richard you've already reported back from SES that it's not a good idea having more than one language on a page. I certainly found it resulted in less search referrals.
There's a number of links related to regional SEO on
logicintuition.com's bookmarks tagged with "regional" on del.icio.us
I think overall there's quite a lot involved in making the best decision. Hopefully this will help...