The subject discussed today is a hot potato in that there is intense debate and discussion whenever this topic comes up. Most SEO professionals would admit that there are several opinions floating around when it comes to targeting an international audience using a single domain and/or using multiple country specific domains.

A major factor from the SEO perspective is the nature of the domain itself. The parent site can be www.site.com domain and it can have sub-folders for various countries as in www.site.com/nz and www.site.com/au.

A great example of this setup is Apple. It has a www.apple.com domain from which it targets users in UK through the domain www.apple.com/uk

Alternatively, you can have a sub domain setup as in nz.site.com and au.site.com.

For those that are targeting different language speaking users, say in Latin America and  and all English speaking countries (US, CA, UK, AU and NZ), the way the domain can be set up is according to the language. It can read www.site.com/en for the English version and www.site.com/es for Spanish speaking users.

From search engines point of view, as of today, all .com domains in various parts of the world are seen from the US perspective. The .com URL is synonymous with sites from America though a new domain .us is available for identifying American sites. As Will Critchlow humourously points out in his post at SEOmoz, it is similar to the World Baseball Championships though it is contested only by teams from within USA.

The search engines still see your .com site as a US IP address in your lookup and even if you have content specific to different countries, the content from .com domain is given prominence and tends to override the country specific content. For searches made for Amazon in UK, the www.amazon.com site appears ahead of www.amazon.co.uk site.

We are not talking about duplicate content issues that arise from using the same language across different country targets (as in English directed at all English speaking countries).

The crux of the problem is this: If you have a business that targets users in New Zealand and Australia (to start with), what is the best way of going about it? Is it good to have a .com domain and target other parts of the world or is it good to have country specific domains for your target audience?

Stay tuned to the next part of this series where we analyse the Search engine optimisation advantages and pitfalls.