This is a question I hear over and over from clients or colleagues who are tasked with managing a global web presence.

And for global site owners – choosing between hosting your global sites on a top-level domain (TLD) versus hosting it centrally on one domain utilizing a sub-directory hierarchy is a fundamental decision on the future direction of your online business. For instance, a business may need to choose between:

Option 1: ‘Molecular.co.uk’ in the United Kingdom, ‘Molecular.com.cn’ in China,

or,

Option 2: ‘Molecular.com/uk_EN/ for United Kingdom (in English)
‘Molecular.com/cn_ZH/ for China (in Chinese)

(Similarly, sub-domain options might also look like: ‘uk.Molecular.com’ for the United Kingdom or ‘china.Molecular.com’ for China).

While the answer is never entirely black and white, it’s not just a SEO decision.  Instead, I would start with 4 simple considerations that we always work to identify and prioritize when building out a domain name strategy with clients:

1)    Need for Marketing-friendly URLs locally
2)    Search Engine Optimization (SEO) priorities
3)    Global Domain Name Registration efforts
4)    CMS hosting / distribution of content considerations

Conveniently, and not surprisingly, the list is prioritized in the manner in which we would recommend defining and mapping out your global TLD strategy – business needs naturally superseding internal IT team preferences.  A bit more detail on each consideration:

1) Need for Marketing-friendly URLs:
First and foremost, there is a significant local ‘branding’ benefit and recognition/association of a country-specific top level domain (TLD) to establishing a locally-relevant and locally-appropriate market presence.  The ability to target, publish, and market to a country-specific TLD within all marketing collateral and use it as an appropriate destination for local marketing campaigns is most ideal – and the biggest priority in deciding upon which hosting solution to choose.

2) Search Engine Optimization (SEO) priorities:
Second, from a global SEO perspective, TLDs are always preferred for full optimization opportunities for indexing within global and local-specific search engines.  We define ‘indexing’ as simply the ability to have your site included within Google / Yahoo / Baidu / etc. search engines, and there are significant benefits to having your local content distributed across appropriate TLDs and hosted on globally-specific IP addresses.  Centralizing content into subdirectories will limit your ability to maximize your indexed URLs and distribution of ranking opportunities for targeted SEO keyphrases across multiple ‘sites’ – particularly around product-name or brand-based targeted keyphrases.

3) Global Domain Name Registration efforts:
Third, domain name registration can be difficult for some organizations to consistently own and manage worldwide.  With varying degrees of local requirements for registration and in-country business ownership validation, the challenge of a decision on a consistent domain/subdirectory strategy across all global sites can be affected by the logistical ability to own all top level domains across the world.  There are some managed services that will assist companies in maintaining the appropriate registration standards worldwide, but often we find IT departments hamstrung for months attempting to clear out ‘squatters’ who might previously own a country-level TLD for a priority market.

4) CMS hosting / distribution of content considerations:
Fourth, content management system (CMS) or distributed content hosting / content delivery factors always play a key role in the decision for a domain / subdirectory strategy.  Often, particularly for ‘coupled’ content delivery CMS systems or for high-security, transactional sites, the content repository needs to reside ‘close’ to where the content is being served up to users – therefore, great flexibility in full TLD and IP Address hosting cannot be fully optimized due to base global CMS publishing limitations.

Once all the above requirements are detailed out, we typically recommend the following best practice hosting solution (listed again in order of preference – and of course assuming Language HTTP Header is correctly assigned in all scenarios):

1)    Country level domain name, hosted on an In-Country IP Address: http://www.molecular.com.br/ (on Brazilian IP: 200.181.3.xxx)
2)    Country level domain name, centrally hosted: http://www.molecular.com.br/ (IP: 24.234.193.xxx)
3)    Centrally managed domain, first level subdirectory with consistent language header ID – note, some 301 permanent redirects from owned TLDs can be pointed to these subdirectories: http://www.molecular.com/br_BR/ or http://www.molecular.com/cn_ZH/

One final thought, there are long-term limitations utilizing of a locale-specific sub-domains (i.e., fr.molecular.com or br.molecular.com).  Over time, since you’re not appropriately associating the preferred ISO locale / language pair consistently in this model, having a ‘be-de.molecular.com’, ‘be-nl.molecular.com’, and ‘be-fr.molecular.com’ website standard may be quite counter-intuitive and relatively confusing for users, marketers, and the entire organization.

I hope this globalization ‘quick tip’ helps to organize your internal team’s hosting discussion – please do add comments or questions if you have any unique global hosting situations that you might be dealing with on your own global site.