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Bonjour! If with rel="alternate" hreflang="x" we can indicate to Google that an URL have translated equivalents of a page, are the links metrics splited between all pages or Google considers all the pages as only one? Thanks! Maxime

Again, it depends of your ressources and your strategy...

Can you tell us more about your company and your international strategy?

Would each site be managed by you or by webmasters independantly in each country?

Are you going to use the same brand name in each country?

What ressources (time, staff and budget) to work on the SEO of each site do you have?

And I forgot to mention this article which is worth to read:

International and Multilingual sites: The Criteria to Establish an SEO Friendly Structure

In that case, I'll go for the Alternate link tag as mentionned before:

By using it, you will guide Google and tell him to show the flemish version in first position for your user in Belgium and vice-versa for the dutch users in Holland.

Hope this helps!

Maxime

BenVer,

Please can you tell us what kind of duplicate content do you have on your different domains (.nl /.be) ?

Are the dutch and belgium page exactly the same? What are the differences?

Thanks,

Maxime

Hi Robert, 1. Yes indeed you are right, for a ccTLD, there is no geotargeting in GWMT. 2. Dutch is spoken in both Netherlands and Belgium so having the same content appearing on both .nl and .be domains is likely to be considered as duplicate content. Using rel=”alternate” hreflang=”x” seems to be the most appropriate solution. 3. In my opinion, hosting each website in the country targeted is a plus (server response will be quicker) but this is indeed not decisive. So do it only if you have a large budget.