Multilingual SEO: Targeting different languages

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Scott Clark: Do you have a "global" page (before a region is selected)?
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  Nazmun Nahar: Scott Clark yes. That`s a .com domain
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  Scott Clark: .com is enough, if you configure this properly. I would then introduce a /us domain for the US content, and then use hreflang to identify the region-chooser as x-default on all pages.
  
  The alternate hreflang tags will appear in each language subdirectory`s pages with self-referential canonical for the current language/current page. Example:
  
  /
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  Richard Hearne: If the US is main/major locale then I`d just go ahead and put that content into / instead of /us.
  
  I would advise strongly against putting the country chooser as your homepage. Both on SEO and UX grounds.
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  Scott Clark: Richard Hearne... You can use geo detection + cookie for setting region. If gd fails, user chooses. Hreflang will signal Google for SEO. common approach.
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  Scott Clark: I agree that it`s common (in the US) to bury the region selector in a menu and make .com root as the x-default, only showing the region selector if geolocation is wrong and the user seeks it out.
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  Richard Hearne: Scott Clark It`s a really bad approach IMO, and the state of GEO detection these days quite poor due to IP databases not being maintained by ISPs. Redirecting based on location is now frowned upon largely, and it`s much better to provide affordance within UI and nice, easy navigation path to appropriate version.
  
  Doing redirects and the like can also hurt SEO, especially since it`s so easy to mess up. KISS is the best approach to this if you ask me.
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  Scott Clark: Just for the record, we do NOT use IP redirection for languages, only for region. Our redirect provider claims 99% at country level, and based on the low traffic in the region selectors, I think it may be close.
  
  To your KISS point, agreed. More than once I`ve seen huge messes, especially on Drupal!
  
  Another issue is non-technical. Treating the US site differently than the other sites is sometimes frowned upon in multinational brands. Putting USA in /us keeps it on equal footing, URL wise.
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  Scott Clark: If you prefer to use country TLDs, such as .fr, you can, just use those instead of the subfolders in the hreflang directives.
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  Nazmun Nahar: Thanks for the advice Scott Clark!