Multiple country site versions and hosting

[cottamg]

If I intend to have 5 versions of an e-commerce site, one for each countries marketplace, would it be best to:

a) Host each site in its own country

b) Host all sites from 1 server/1 country

I'm presuming that hosting in each country is better? But how quantifiable is this, and is it worth the extra hosting and management costs?

Any advice gratefully received..

[cottamg]

Thanks guy, lots of what you say make great sense and has given me lots to think about and research further.

Much appreciated.

[AlanMosley]

Make sure they all have their own tld, and you will not have no duplicate content problems.
make sure you use the correct dataing formats and currencey formats for each countries, spelling also

See what Matt Cutts has to say.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ets7nHOV1Yo

[Alex-Harford]

Rand does a great job with this issue here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-where-to-host-and-how-to-target-whiteboard-friday

This is worth a read too: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/03/working-with-multi-regional-websites.html

Every situation is different but it can be more beneficial to host everything on a .com with subfolders for each language - e.g. www.somewebsite.com/es, www.somewebsite.com/fr etc. Each subfolder URL can be geotargeted in Google Webmaster Tools. This would be much easier than maintaining 5 separate websites.

I don't agree with Zsolt - if you have a .fr you wouldn't need to host in France as the .fr covers it, the same with .de, .it or any extension. Some people prefer to click on a website with their native domain extension in the URL, probably more so with e-commerce sites (something to do with trust, easy shipping and so on) - so that's something to take into consideration.  I can't remember if Rand mentions this in the above video.

[sesertin]

Hello Gary,

The better solution for sure is to host sites in their own county like mentioned here: http://www.dirjournal.com/articles/multilingual-seo/

At the mean time you should take the product into consideration as well. If it has low serch traffic and not really competitive in the target country you can give it a try with one page, as a tld for english sites does not prohibit it to rank in France for example, so traffic and competition matters, but different tld and hosting are better choice in the long run.

If you are doing it with one site you can implement a content delivery network so that you pages are loading faster in target areas and taht is good for seo, however it does not replace the signal the local server gives to google about the target area.