anallawalla - 11:10 pm on Jan 8, 2010 (gmt 0)

Just from my own observations, business sites have no single way to tackle this problem. Some use subdirectories, some use subdomains and some use ccTLDs. Unless an SEO was involved, their designers are not thinking of ranking at all, so you can't assume they are doing it correctly. Large companies can "solve" traffic issues with PPC. Smaller entities have to get it right on the cheap.

Since I live in .au, I can see that many Australians use Google.com.au set to Pages from Australia when they need a local result. Unless you point a gTLD to .au in Google WMT or use a .au ccTLD, you won't appear for such searches. Relying on IP addresses is unreliable. :) Hence I prefer to see the use of ccTLDs, local translations, language identifiers in the code, and ideally, a fresh template for each country.

I am currently helping out a businesss that is physically in 35 countries and which uses numerous languages but is using just one .com gTLD. They have used subdomains for the non-English languages, e.g. jp.example.com. WMT has not been used to point to any country. They are using some tool for content negotiation (on IIS), which merely replaces a news story on their home page (and possibly other pages) with a local story, e.g. an Irish success story if the viewer is in Ireland.

I am not in favour of content negotiation because Googlebot always comes from the US and sees the "US" content. See this discussion [webmasterworld.com] and this one [webmasterworld.com].

As for my example Australian company, it is hosted here, which has worked against their global goals. It does very well for its main search terms in google.com.au (Pages from Australia), but very poorly in google.com. Their global expansion is recent, hence the strong bias towards Australian ranking. Their inbound links also heavily favour Australian sites, for the same historic reasons. I haven't finished diagnosing their situation, but I expect to be recommending a ccTLD solution.

Don't overlook the off-site work. If you want the better regional directories to list the website in various countries, will they admit the URL into their directory? That should help you decide.

In my observation of other global businesses including my past employers, the implementation seems to be weighted towards saving money in the head office (and the webmaster's time) and not what's best for international revenues.

Sometimes petty thinking, e.g. "Our (head office) IT budget does not cover the website in Country X and they are just a sales office, so they will have to share our website". Such decisions probably never reach the notice of top management, which might only see poor sales (traffic) in those countries.