Hi there,

I've been doing work in Japan for some time now and although I would probably have my URL's in Japanese I found that if I hagoo sound meter data, correct charset for that language and good links from Japanese domains when the content of my pages are served pretty well. See example here - http://www.instantatlas.com/whatisinstantAtlas_JP.html

I would say that most traffic from the above page actually comes from Yahoo Japan than say Google Japan (it does come but not in the same volume). I have a Chinese equivalent and traffic to this landing page comes from Baidu. I would like to point out that for both pages they will drive Japanese, Chinese and English queries from these countries.

We are about to embark on an overhaul of this page to include easier navigation, structured data etc.

Happy to share outcomes on these change over the coming weeks if it helps.

Best

David

Thanks Gary for coming back on this one. - nice suggestion.

We ended up buying the domain in France.

Many thanks,

David

Hi,

I was wondering if any one knows if the French government has changed it's stance in recent years to the ownership of domains in their country. My understanding is that it can be pretty difficult to own a domain there if you do not reside there. In the past I have had people register domains using their passport as identification to prove their domicile in that country.

We like many others have sites with .com/fr etc. and we do have one domain that is a .fr and seriously out performs the .com version.

Many thanks for any input on this question.

David

*** UPDATE - Sorry no need for a response, I've just been informed that businesses who are located in a Member State of the European Union (EU) are allowed to own .fr domains which the French government needs to comply with.

Best,

David

Depending on the thematics and neutrality of your content that you want to create, I would suggest adding an additional category of .edu and .gov.uk for the UK market. I actively look for and write in .gov.uk sites and this makes up about 5% of my Root Domain link profile. Not sure these days how Google determines the domain link quality of an academic and government sites but pretty sure they are still deemed as being of high quality and trusted.

Granted these types of domains are tricky to get content on but worth trying out.

David