Interlinking tld country and language domains?

Translated versions of a site

[jsnow]

We are about to embark on translating our site into a few languages. One of the things I have to decide is whethere to have them located www.domain.com/es/ or to have country specific domains

The best solution would be to have country domains primarily because regional search engines are more likely to include them

the thing that I am worried about is the fact that every page of each site will have a link to every other site. Will they all be penalized for heavy linking?

[jsnow]

Anybody have somes pearls of wisdom

[Crush]

50 50...who knows. Google likes big sites at the moment. You might get more value from making one big site. Then again if you get a load of diffrent domains and link them you might get some benefit from that providing you get other incoming links.

A 3rd idea would be to make subdomains. Google also loves these at present. As for local SE's at present google has an 80% market share so I would be concentrating on what G likes

[gpmgroup]

We have several multi language sites

We use the following structure

www.domain.com/ (English)
www.domain.com/es (Spanish)
www.domain.com/fr (French)
www.domain.com/de (German)
www.domain.com/it (Italian)

This structure ranks well on each of the regional Google sites and Google.com

If you were to register each domain you would also need to consider www.domain.es www.domain.mx www.domain.eq etc.

Just for the Spanish alone

[jsnow]

thanks for the rsponses and it would seem the best idea is to keep it all under one domain

[tenerifejim]

jsnow,

It's also quite difficult to reserve a local domain, for example .es, .de or .fr if your host is not in those countries.

<appended>

Sorry forgot to add- however, you may want to remember that widgets in german is vidgets, so a different domain name spelling maybe relevant. We've just bought vidgets.com for one of our site translations and the Germans really appreciate it.

[jsnow]

We are actually in this industry so are acutely aware of the cultural considerations. Ideally we would have done exactly that and bought relevant local domains for the countries we are targeting but would be too concerned about penalties for heavily linking different domains!

[tenerifejim]

jsnow,

There's a silimar thread to your topic going on right now at [webmasterworld.com ]. I don't completely buy this heavily interlinking stuff. Particular if the content is unique, and translations, of course, are.

[jsnow]

Thanks for the tip!