There is also the argument that search engines take into account where your server is actually placed, so if you have a site in Australia about Australian stuff and the server is in the US then the site may not do so well in Australia. We don’t have any idea what sort of weighting this sort of thing has in the Google algorithm.

I did a bit of a quick research to see what other sites were doing. Sony has completely different URLs for each country, as did Air New Zealand, Apple on the other hand keeps the user in the .com and adds the language, Hostel World creates a sub domain for each language, Hertz rent a car made the translations dynamically, Crown Relocations don’t seem to offer any multi-languages at all from their .com site (and their .co.uk redirected to .com) and Avis rentals recognised I was in New Zealand based on my IP address and showed me a NZ specific site - I hate that!

Unless I am missing something very obvious the Avis site drives me crazy. The NZ specific site is all in English and does not have anywhere obvious for me to change languages - but what if I was a German tourist already in NZ wanting to rent a car! Apparently Lycos did this in the early days and one of the biggest outcrys was in Belgium where there are a disproportionate amount of international workers yet Lycos displayed every time in Flemish. Whatever strategy you choose make sure it is obvious to your users how to change languages, especially if you are going to default to their local site based on IP addresses.

I think if I was to build large sites that were multi-lingual and cross-border in operation I would be inclined to create whole new sites on regional URLs. It is one thing translating a tourism site where you are operating in a specific area although selling across multiple markets and how Google looks at those translations compared to a site such as yours where you are selling essentially a different product in each market - albeit the same service. Relocating from Portugal to New Zealand is a quite different product than relocating from Germany to England and I would think that Google is therefore treating the translated pages all as independent sites sort of - bad explanation, but I hope you know what I mean. I think from a search engine and user point of view it would be better if you created different sites for each operating area and rather than simply translating the original you completely rewrote the content to reflect the nuisances of the specific markets.

After some consultation I have come to realise that there is an arguement towards having a different URL for each language, and perhaps even localised hosting. The other option is of course straight redirects to the relevant page, but I have also heard on several occassions that Google prefers to have content attached to a URL rather than redirects.

At the moment I am at a cross roads. Any idea on which strategy would work best for a multilingual, multi url site?