SEO learning's from expanding internationally

After this last year I have walked away with a lot of information about how Google reacts to expanding your brand into new countries.

My first hassle was acquiring local domains within each country:

Requirements within the UK, a Royal Postal Address, even a PO Box will do. Not a tough one.

Requirements in Germany are quite the same, a local address within Germany to acquire the domain.

France was a huge hassle, not only a local address was required but as soon as you attempted to acquire an SSL certificate the process became slow and aggravating. You can only maintain your registration for up to 1 year in France, thus if you forget to renew you could be in trouble.

The most surprising for such a low hassle culture was Australia, you need to provide a mountain of documentation and prove that you are a resident of Australia to obtain a local domain.

During this acquisition process of domains we decided to launch under sub-domains from a US hosted .com. As you may know already if you have a .com and it's hosted in the US, it can be a huge hassle to get listed locally in country. With some nifty routing and clever negotiations I was able to get IP's from other countries completely re-assigned to me locally. When you broadcast a foreign IP, it's still mapped as being from the local country thus you can be identified as being from in country. This was a very successful approach rather than the extreme alternative which was to open an expensive data center.

During this process I was also told that RIPE addresses are EU addresses and not specific per country. This is not true, and will cause your other foreign sites to be thrown in the wrong country.

While launching these new properties I also discovered that if you are in Germany and an English based site within Germany links to you, it still helps. As long as the content on the site is themed and relevant, it seems that Google simply examines theme of the links pointing into the English site, which many where German and had extremely related content.

I walked away with the basic premise that if you host and have a local TLD in country your life will be so much easier. The search engines have a long way to go to provide a simple way to handle multi country businesses.