How solve multiple languages and TLD's without duplicate content problems

[gserneels]

Fact 1: we have a domainname with many differente TLD’s
- www.example.nl
- www.example.be
- www.example.fr
- www.example.de
- www.example.co.uk
- www.example.com

Fact 2: our website is multilingual
- Dutch
- French
- German
- English

Question: how do we organise this?

Solution 1: redirect all the specific TLD’s to the .com version and use a subfolder for the different languages, so it would be:
- www.example.com/nl (Dutch)
- www.example.com/fr (French)
- www.example.com/de (German)
- www.example.com/en (English)

=> looks like an easy solution, but can we rank high enough in the different countries?
=> doesn’t Google “attach” a main location and language to an certain domain?
=> linkbuilding goes all to the same domain
=> or is it better to use subdomains like fr.example.com for French, does this make a difference for Google?

Solution 2: use each specific TLD separately:
- www.example.nl (Dutch)
- www.example.be (Dutch AND French)
- www.example.fr (French)
- www.example.de (German)
- www.example.co.uk (English)
- www.example.com (English)

=> maybe better for local rankings, but more difficult for the different languages
=> how to solve the 2 languages Dutch and French in Belgium?
=> how to solve the duplicate content on .nl and .be (Dutch) and .co.uk and .com (English)?
=> we need linkbuilding for each domain separately

My main concerns are good rankings (maybe solution 2 is the best, but don’t we need much more linkbuilding here?) and duplicate content (here solution 1 is the best, but are we going to get good rankings? And what about our customers, someone who lives in France prefers the buy something on www.example.fr instead of www.example.com/fr or fr.example.com).

Please help me out with this!
Any suggestions or other solutions are welcome.
Many many thanks in advance.

[Leosghost]

And what about our customers, someone who lives in France prefers the buy something on www.example.fr

Yes they will always prefer to buy from www.example.fr

And the search engines will give you higher ranking in organic search from France if you have www.example.fr in french ..and hosted on french servers ..with french language inbound links ..from preferably other dot fr's hosted in France ..

Even if the searcher in France has selected "results from the web" ..and not specifically results in french, pages in french or pages from France ..the big search engines G and Bing will push them results in french from France on dot fr's first ..

BTW welcome to WebmasterWorld :)

[Alex_TJ]

We face the same issue, but this thread seems to have been forgotten.
What are others' opinions on this? What have you seen work best, both from a customer's and SEM's POV?

[tedster]

If the business needs to see strong local results within the regional Googles, I usually go with the multiple TLDs.

The exception? If the .com is already well established and showing strength regionally, then staying with the single domain has some benefits. You can still experiment with a 301 redirect from example.com/de/ to example.de (or some other single ccTLD) to see if that improves or hurts results before deciding on one overall strategy.

The thing is Google is still evolving on issues like this - so there's no certainty you can stand on.

With regard to Belgium using both Dutch and French, such language issues just to be released to Google, I think - they're not something we can control. I have a similar issue on one German language site that we ant to see ranking on google.at and google.de. The results from our .com oscillate in an out, so I can't give you any definitive best practice from experience.