We have been working on SEO initiatives for our corporate English language website with phenomenal results. We want to extend this success to our 30 international websites which are folders on our.com site hosted in the US as opposed to top level domains hosted in-country. I understand that because of the international sites being folders on .com and hosted in the US, international SEO efforts might be futile since international versions of Google need the website to be a top level domain and hosted in-country.

I find it very hard to believe that since the folder-level architecture is such a common thing with organizations with international versions of their website.

Has anyone else run into that? Or have any suggestions?

Hi,
the fact that your regional websites are folders makes no difference - don't get side tracked by all the noise you hear about mutlilingual issues - I rank top on a .name bolg for very competitive terms on regional and .com search engines with my bilingual blog.

Now having said that, the first thing you want to do is run a competitive analysis and benchmark yourself against those sites you identify as competitors and only then begin to evaluate your options w.r.t. possible improvements on architecture or other multilingual issues (for example regional hosting with redional TLDs) to achieve top rankings - all this might not be necessary - never shoot a butterfly with a cannon ...

__________________

Sante J. Achille
Search Engines & Web Marketing Consultant
skype: rifardo