So i have a site that has data/news for 20 countries, most of it hung off a subdomain for that country, like: de.mydomain.com fr.mydomain.com The first, original, US focused site is on www domain. each subdomain is linked from bottom of page on all pages, all subs of mydomain.com with a flag and text link. each country site has unique content, in local language and is being submitted to directories for that country, most in that country tld. 1. Do you like the strategy how would you change it? Note i can't get my domain name in all countries tlds, so that is not an option to consider. 2. Will the subdomains bestow rank to the www domain? will a strong fr.mydomain.com make www stronger? what about de.mydomain.com? any other thoughts on the topic are appreciated.
You need to build geographical\ccTLD backlinks to the sub-domains to boost their rankings in geographical searches, how you have it setup right now is fine. Increase building backlinks in that manner is the best move to make.
Agreed. And while the bit of advice I'm about to give isn't within the realm of SEO, make sure you use the lang="" attribute to identify the language used on the links for the specific language-version pages, such as <li id="french" lang="fr"><a href="#">Français<span></span.</a></li> (note the span is there because I like using empty SPANs as a container for an accessible and SEO friendly CSS based image substitution technique - I also tend to have such language links inside a list as well that has a unique ID on the list and the specific list items).