Best way to setup large site for multi language

[DavidLenehan]

Hello, I am setting up a new site which is going to be very large, over 250,000 products. Most of our customers are in the UK (45%), the rest are from various European countries and the USA. Unfortunately we only have a team of two people writing content for these pages in English. I would value some input on the best way to setup my website structure for ranking. Obviously the best would be individual country oriented domains I.e. domain.fr domain.de domain.co.uk . However we wouldnt have the time to create content for every page and most pages would contain the same content as the English domain. Would I get a penalty for this from google? The second choice is to follow the example of overstock.com and pull in information relating to each country I.e. currency and delivery time. this would be a lot easier but I am concerned that the lack of geo focus would effect my rankings. Does any one have any ideas?

[DavidLenehan]

Cheers. Do you know anyone doing one big international site well?

[matbennett]

I've not tried it on a site of that size - 2 lanuages at about 90k products is my biggest so far I think.

However, yes I'd be careful.  Without country specific content you could be heading for a right panda kicking if you try to have seperate product pages for each country.

All other things being equal you probably are not going to rank as easily as in all countries as those with true geographic focus. I don't think overstock do this particularly well. Certainly one store I works with is competing with them on quite a lot of products and I never see them in the SERPs.

Things that might help though:
Other local language content - product guides? category information etc.

Possibly an "ordering from (insert country)" page, with details, including  a local phone number

Lots of links from the target countries.