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ish - 10:27 pm on Jun 18, 2002 (gmt 0)
Supposing we launch a French language version of the site. Potentially we can reach customers in the following European countries:
Thank you for the excellent feedback. It raises a new issue for me:
From the posts above it seems that the general consensus is that a gTLD should be ok for most engines/directories, but that a ccTLD may be better in some cases. It also seems, logically, that a foreign ccTLD is not a good idea. e.g. don't use a .be for targetting France.
Therefore, to target French speaking Europeans we have 2 options.
1. Purhcase a ccTLD for each country (assuming we can get a .fr)
2. Buy one gTLD
Based on the above posts, option 1 seems marginally preferable.
Assuming we go for option 1, should we
(a) set up a separate site for each country (sharing a database in this case)
(b) point all the domains to the same site?
I suspect that we may have trouble with Google with options (a) and (b):
- Google won't like option (a) as there will be 3 (almost) identical sites available.
- Option (b) has problems too as Google will index only 1 of the domains.
Summary
A gTLD is looking preferable again unless we can make the 3 sites different enough for Google to not regard them as spam.
Any thoughts?