Hi
Here's somethings I have come across regarding targeting multiple geographic areas with a single domain.
This works with non-country specific domains (.com, .org, .net etc) it will not work with country specific TLD's.
In Google webmaster tools we all know that we can set a sites geographic target area, now what I didn't realise till just recently is that you can submit a subdirectory as a site in webmaster tools... so we can have multiple sites on a single domain:
www.exampledomain.com
www.exampledomain.com/country2
www.exampledomain.com/country3
So we could set the straight domain www.exampledomain.com to be a USA geographic target, www.exampledomain.com/country2 to be a Spain geographic target and www.exampledomain.com/country3 to be a France geographic target.
This also will work for subdomains so you could use:
www.exampledomain.com : set geographic target to USA
france.exampledomain.com : set geographic target to France
spain.exampledomain.com : set geographic target to Spain
Personally I think the folder version looks neater.
If you are translating content into different languages then you won't have duplicate content issues between different versions in differenct subfolders, however if you are targetting differing geographic areas which share a common language (such as USA, UK, Canada and Australia) then you'll have to spend some time on unique content for each to get around the duplicate content filter I would think.
Anyway, I think we have an alternative answer for the recurring "how do i target multiple geographic areas?" in some cases now
