Keep 12-year old domain or use all new local domains?

[mameha1977]

I run a multi-region, multi-language site in the following way:

www.example.com/us/
www.example.com/de/
www.example.com/cn/
www.example.com/uk/
www.example.com/fr/
www.example.com/kr/
www.example.com/ja/
etc...

The domain name itself has been active and in our name for over 12 years, and has many inlinks to the root www.example.com and the /ja/ site.

I am now considering moving the regional sites to seperate servers, like this:

US Site = www.example-us.com on a US server
German Site = www.example.de on a server in germany
Chinese Site = www.example.cn on a server in china
etc...

Ignoring the effort and cost to implement and maintain, from an SEO standpoint would this be a wise move or not?

[edited by: tedster at 12:47 am (utc) on Feb. 22, 2008]
[edit reason] switch to example.com - it can never be owned [/edit]

[tedster]

The first thing I'd mention is that there is a lot of material already on this forum about localization of search - a good selection of threads is available in the Hot Topics area [webmasterworld.com], which is always pinned to the top of this forum's index page.

I assume you're trying to improve local rankings in various regional Google results, and you know that server location is a significant factor. But it's not the only factor, and if I were in your shoes, I would first use every other strategy I could before splitting up a 12 year old domain into a pile of new ones. Each new domain would have a battle to establish itself in search.

The first thing I would try is using a Webmaster Tools account to tell Google which countries each section of your domain is targeting, something that Google introduced last fall:

Tell Google Your Site's Location with Webmaster Tools [webmasterworld.com]

[mameha1977]

Thanks, actually I started using geographic targetting as soon as it was released. The 3 weeks following that, my traffic bounced up and down by 20% then settled back to how it was before. I dont think it gave any advantage to my local sites.

[Wlauzon]

I have not kept up with it, but at one time it was the general consensus that the age of the domain had some relevance in SE rankings.

I don't know if anyone has ever really figured it out, but I do know that we have links to our domain that are over 10 years old and still live.

[man in poland]

Interesting one. It would be good to know a bit more about each of these directories - is the /cn/ one entirely in Chinese and primarily aimed at Chinese speakers, or does it have lots of info say, about China but in multiple other languages? That would make a big difference to the decision.

I had a number of small number of sites in a specific European language sitting on a US server. When I moved them to a server in the audience target country, traffic rose dramatically as they climbed up the Local SERPS. Of course there is also the advantage (if they are single-language sites) that this will also provide faster access to local users. Always remember the users!

[mameha1977]

Yes the CN site is all chinese, KR is all korean etc.

Technically I'm not sure how to achieve it because it is a PHP site. Maybe there is some way to serve the pages from the existing server to the local servers somehow?

[walkman]

how about cn.domain.com, kr.domain.com and so on?

the .country before the domain sends the message that this is local, and you still keep the best domain name as a brand. You can keep them in one server and tell google to target a territory for each subdomain I think on Webmaster tools. I don't like the www.domain.com/de/ etc style.

[mameha1977]

Yes I wanted to do that from the beginning but the system dept run the server and they were reluctant to set up subdomains.

Can anyone confirm that this subdomain style works better than www.example.com/us/ style?