Best Practice for International Website with Two Versions

[mollykathariner_ms]

I have a client in the medical industry, and the company's product has been approved in various countries in Europe yet is awaiting approval in the US. That means we can share certain information in some countries that we cannot share in the US. Therefore, we plan to use an initial landing page that will ask what country the user is in (using a drop-down list to choose from if not located in the US) and then push him or her to the appropriate version of the site.

Here is my question: What is the best way to ensure search engines can crawl the site beyond this landing page?

Thanks for your time.

[mollykathariner_ms]

Thanks, Ben. You bring up some important points and a good solution with the multiple links rather than the drop-down menu.

[Audiohype]

I would say you need to have crawlable links from the initial landing page. Can you not create a page with links to the different sites rather than having a drop down box? You could then have text links for the search engines to crawl. Alternatively you could use a javascript drop down.

As long as the search engines can get past the initial page there should be no issues with them crawling the rest of the site.

I would also question how you are going to display the different versions of the site in terms of duplicate content. Are the different sites going to be hosted in different subfolders? e.g. www.domain.com/en and www.domain.com/us?

If they are going to be hosted like this I would strongly recommend considering your strategy for avoiding duplicate content across these sites.