When you go to international sites like Ferrari, for example, you're first shown a front page that forces you to select what country you're in. If the top level page with the forced selection is ferrari.com, wouldn't the selection feature make ferrari.com difficult, if not impossible to rank? Is there any way to incorporate the selection feature, make the SEO good, and keep all the content on the same domain? (instead of, for example, having the selector page redirect to different domains, which can then be indexed?) Any ideas on best practice here? I realize that the question may be a little confusing...
What most of these websites do is they have tlds like .co.uk, .com, .com.au, .cn etc. They use .com for all countries except the UK, Australia, China and whatever big non english speaking countries they can. So they still have all the content on .com, but they let local HQs build content around their own Tld too.
Do you actually want to have all of the different countries contents indexed in the search engines? You could just keep other languages in a different subdirectory - /fr /de, etc. And the homepage would have text links to the different version of the sites. That's basically what Ikea dot com does.
You must consider that Ferrari is a very popular name, a super hot keyword. So what works on ferrari.com might not work on unknownbrandname.com.
I'm using Ferrari as an example. The difference selections would be a) all in the same language b) on the same domain. So, let's say the selection were... A or B A --> domain.com/a B --> domain.com/b How would this site hierarchy affect SEO you think?