.com vs .com/language ?

[JoomGeek]

Hello Moooooooooz !

We're currently working on a new website http://www.globalmetal.fr/ which deep SEO issues.

The problematic is as always in this case: 1 company + different subsidiaries + different markets + different languages

The companies is handling different domains:

http://www.globalmetal.fr/
www.globalmetalbroker.ch
www.globalmetalbroker.com
and so on.

Until recently I was totally convinced (there is no magic solution I know) that it was better for a SME to focus on 1 domain (.com) and get the other websites per language .com/fr .com/es etc.

But in their case their TLD is pretty new: www.globalmetalbroker.com (DA 1) vs globalmetal.fr (DA 15)

So I'm wondering:

1- Does Google know understand that globalmetal.fr is the french website of globalmetalbroker.com (maybe via webmaster tool) ?
2- Does it make senss to move all the (new) language websites into .com/[folders] and once the .com DA is doing better redirecting the .fr to.com/fr ?
3- Is it better to focus on .com .fr (but french speakers are not just in france) .ru and so on or to keep the .com/[languages]

Hope someone got the same issue recently

[JoomGeek]

For russia and china you're right it does make sens. But I'm still very concerned about working on so many domains rather than just one

[gfiorelli1]

In the specific case of a targeting Russia (or China), a .ru is a better solution also because you must consider that Google is not the only über dominant search engine there. All the contrary, the most used is Yandex, and Yandex SEO has many things different from Google SEO, more than, for instance, are the differences between Google and Bing.

That means, that optimizing a web site for Yandex, especially in the link building front, may let you relying on actions that would be not so acceptable for Google.

Identical it's the case of targeting China (Baidu), Korea (Naver) or Japan (Yahoo).

[Highland]

While that's true, you can more easily geotarget your ccTLDs. A Russian site is more likely to link to a .ru site than some .com

[JoomGeek]

Tks for this answer ! But then our issue gonna be to work on the DA (link building and so on) of .com and .fr and .ru rather than .com

[Highland]

1. It's hard to say. They don't match up exactly. But Google should be able to tell the difference if both sites have essentially the same content in different Geotargeting
2. No. It's important to note that ccTLDs send out a strong geotargeting signal. More importantly, you would lose some of your SEO "juice" trying to restructure that many sites into only one.
3. If you have a dire need for some targeting of a language I would put a page on your .com site that would direct users to the .fr site for French. Trying to do French on an English site, when you have a French site, makes no sense.