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Hi All

Our company is looking to expand into Europe (we are a UK based company) and we are planning to copy over our current .co.uk site to a .com one and create 301 redirects to maintain our SEO rankings.

With the .com domain we were looking to use this as our main ecommerce site and then create sites for different countries in Europe.

What we are unsure about is the best way to execute this in terms of the domain.

Would it be best to have it setup as a domain structure such as:

UK = www.example.com/gb/
Ireland = www.example.com/ie/
France – www.example.com/fr/ and so on.

Or would we be better served creating sub domains for each country, example www.gb.example.com.

Our main concerned is what is the best way to do this without hurting our SEO rankings.

Thanks for the help.

Guys,
I'd like to thank you both for your answers and help with this. I have a much better idea of the way forward now.

Andy, thanks for your reply.

We secured the irish domain, proving we already operate in Ireland was the easy part.

I'm with you on a single site, single point of administration. My huge concern was with the duplicate content.

For this to work we need to secure the .com domain.

A client is looking to expand their ecommerce business into Europe. They have already purchased a number of European brand domain names and want to start their expansion in Ireland.

Is it better to have a single website with pages translated for each language or a seperate site for each domain/country?

With Ireland the only obvious difference is the currency, language shouldn't be an issue. But if we choose seperate sites for each domain/country will having the same product content/descriptions especially in the case of Ireland be an issue?

Thanks in advance