My 10 pence ...
I recently advised a client on a similar issue - they're going international and were trying to work out the benefits of ccTLDS vs subdomains vs subfolders (e.g. yoursite.fr vs fr.yoursite.com vs yoursite.com/fr).
They were particularly concerned about which approach would lead to higher rankings (rather than which would cost more / take longer etc).
After some fairly thorough research on the subject, I summarised the issue into two main points:
1. There is no right or wrong way. Amazon / Apple / Wikipedia (for example) all do it differently and it works out fine for them. Right / wrong case studies are very difficult to find, and there's a lot of fence sitting by almost everyone.
2. There is however a tradeoff between geo-targeted relevancy and amount of work needed to promote the sites:
- A well optimised, country specific ccTLD will out perform a subdomain / subfolder in a straight fight, but there's no cross-over in your campaigns. You need to work each campaign from scratch. More work, but greater reward if you can pull it off.
- On the other end of the scale, sub-folder campaigns will all help each other as all links are pointing to the same domain (so perhaps less work needed). However, their potential is not quite as great as the ccTLD approach.
- The sub-domain approach sits between them, but towards the subfolder end of the scale (some crossover, but slightly less potential).
I'm sure the above is old news to you, but it helped my client to visualise that trade-off. Either way, I based my personal recommendation to them (and now to you) on budget / resource.
- If you have the budget / resources to run separate campaigns competitively, play the long game and go for separate domains.
- If you want a slightly more cautious approach, perhaps have a smaller budget than you'd like, go for the sub-folders.
Finally, I must admit, I am an armchair commentator here, having never gone through one of these properly before. This really is my interpretation of the consensus of SEO opinion.
Do let me know which way you decide to go.
Rob
