Sub Directory or Sub Domain - eh and what?

Something I've been doing all week, including the latter half of last week also, was looking at the internationalisation of domains. Now that our new Metafocus Global website has been launched, we're looking at the best methods of helping our clients reach out to their global customers with online marketing. As we've built a few successful multilingual websites, we have looked at the best way for a business to represent themselves both to their chosen audience and also to the search engines.

The first issue to consider even before the website has been built is how the Domain is going to be organised. Say, for example, a company wants to appeal to the Chinese market and have a Chinese translation of their website. Obviously you want to have a dedicated area that has the content in Chinese, but this can be done using a Top Level Domain (TLD), a Sub Domain or a Sub Directory. I'll go through each in turn:

1. A TLD is a new domain for your business, www.business-china.com. This will essentially be a new site that can be hosted in your targeted country, i.e. China.
   
2. A Sub Domain is a new domain that is part of your existing domain; http://china.business.co.uk/
3. A Sub Directory is part of your existing site located in a folder; www.business.co.uk/china

I won't go into too much detail about each as this would be a very long post indeed. Instead you can find a good overview of it at the Matt Cutts blog.

What is interesting about the three approaches is how they are currently being used by some international websites. Amazon is a good example of focusing a domain to the targeted country, as they have a dedicated domain for the UK www.amazon.co.uk. When it comes to translating a new site into a different language Yahoo! have made use of the Sub Domains. For example Yahoo! in France is found at http://fr.yahoo.com. The advantage of this is that this will appear in the local search engines, for example in Google.fr:



A different approach is used by both Microsoft and Adobe by using the Sub Directory. www.adobe.com/de/ for example is a translated site into German and targeted towards the German market. This is a good method for making the site manageable in terms of content management but the obvious issue with this is concerned with duplicating the site and making it twice, or in the case of Adobe 100 times, as large.

There are also SEO factors associated with which method you will use. Again I could write a lot on this also, so have a look at these Google results and read some of the Forums for people's opinions about the SEO of different domains.

There are many factors that can influence which strategy to use for an international domain. I personally believe it comes down to how much time and investment you have. With the TLD being the best option, its really down to the time and effort of the company. But then again, both Adobe and Microsoft are hardly short of either and use the simplest, quickest option. A good blog explaining the different strategies is this particular blog. I suppose the answer is in what each business wants for its global online strategy. I hope this helps :-)