Ecuador, as Mexico, offer both .ec and .com.ec (also Spain does it).

So you can choose one of the two. What's sure is that both will be geotargeting Ecuador.

If you use the hreflang, specifing that the first site URLs are meant to be shown in Google.com.ec and all the others to every other spanish speaking Googles, you should not have problem for the duplicated content (which, actually it is not, having the prices in different currencies). The hreflang has been adopted by Google explicitly for those kind of situations (http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077).

Said that, it may exists still a tiny risk that both domain will be shown in google.com.ec, because you are targeting with it all the spanish Googles (included Ecuador, theorically)... but that should be really a sort of hiccup of the hreflang use.

By the way, why aren't you using an ecuadorian domain name for the first site? That would give it more strength in term of geotargeting.

Ciao

Hi Scott,

sorry to tell you that you're doing International SEO quite bad. No offence, but what you describe is how not to do International SEO.

If you are targeting Spanish end users, you must localize in Spanish everything:

• template elements;
• URLs
• products description
• Titles
• e.v.e.r.y.t.h.i.n.g

It is not just a question of SEO, but of usability too. Just revert the situation: what would be your reaction if you enter in a site, click on the english version and everything is written in Spanish?

Obviously, if you have the spanish version of your all in spanish, that will help a lot ranking for spanish queries.

In order to find an answer to your doubts, I warmly suggest you to read this guide to International SEO I wrote here on SEOmoz few time ago: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-dropping-the-information-dust

Ciao

Your answer is conceptually correct, but the implementation not that much.

This kind of URL is not the ideal: http://www.rentalinrome.com/trevifountainapartments_spa/treviluxurypenthouse

The best is to put every language mirror of your multilingual site in a subfolder: i.e. /es/ in the above cited case.

Google, in fact, understands better that the /es/, /de/, /fr/ subfolders are targeting Spanish, German and French, as those are the ISO codes for those languages.

The subfolders way, then, is even more suggested if you are targeting a country, because you can geotarget a subfolder in Google Webmasters Tools.

Finally, a warm suggestion: if you really want to be sure to rank in Russia, then you should think about Yandex SEO... which means:

• Having the site in a .ru domain name (Yandex is biased toward russian domain terminations);
• Have the site in russian.. also the URLs (yours is in english)