Questions about multi langual site

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

• 
  Ronni Hansen: Hey guys.
  
  I have questions about multi langual site.
  
  I have a Danish site .dk in Denmark. Now i am opening a shop in Germany also.
  I have a really good domain so would like to use the company name/ domain on the German .de market.
  
  So danish customers would go to www.domain.dk and German also go to the same adress and then get geo transfered to www.domain.dk/de or go direct to /de
  
  I would make it as 2 seperate sites and seperate databases but it would look like one site thats just multi langual.
  My webshop can not handle multible currencies and its gonna be a Danish and a German company.
  
  I will mark up both site with lang tags "da" and "de".
  
  1. What more should i be aware of seo wise?
  
  2. How can i in Webmaster tool assign the /de site to the German market when the domain is set for the Danish market?
  
  3. Other tips is very welcome :-)
• 
  Federico Sasso: Unfortunately - at least for Google - .dk is strictly bound to Denmark, which make it really tough to compete on a google.de for the German market.
  I know SEO people I highly respect claiming they managed to rank well on a market with a different country level domain; I personally never did and highly suggest registering a .de (or a generic top level domain, like .com if you target German speaking market, not only Germany). Then you can leverage alternate/hreflang links when feasible.
  Hope this helps
• 
  Neeraj Pandey: Agree with +Federico Olivieri .. In cctld you can't go out of that country and if u want to target more than 1 country u need to take tld. With cctld and folder u can target different language in the same country
• 
  Ronni Hansen: Ok. I guessed it maybe would be a problem but hoped not.
  
  So my new plan is to make a German domain like www.googledk.de for seo ranking but then stil make offline markedting on www.google.dk and then geo redirect.
  
  1. Will it get punished that i get direct German traffic on the .dk domain and direct it to the .de domain?
  
  2. Well now the .de domain gonna be a copy of the the .dk domain just translated.
  Will i run into duplicate or "copyright" issues with Google.
  I know if one website makes a copy of a content of a older one then the new or maybe both gets in "trouble"
• 
  Federico Sasso: Mind if I answer in reverse order, Ronni?
  
  2) A translated version is not considered "duplicate content", and this is especially true for completely different languages (for language variations like en-US vs en-GB you would need to help Google sorting them out with alternate/hreflang links), so no duplicate content issues here.
  Regarding copyright infringement, if I understood correctly there is none. Both the Danish and German versions are your contents and you own the copyright for them. Keep also in mind that search engines are not the "copyright police", that's not what their algorithms are geared for. They only take action against copyright infringement when solicited with a DMCA request by an offended party, and that would involve a manual check.
  
  1) "punished" is not the correct word in my humble opinion, but I would be careful not to confuse search engines here. According to Google, an URL which (302) redirects incoming request based on their IP or accept-language HTTP header should be tagged with hreflang="default-x", but the behaviour should be consistent. I wouldn't do it of an IP range only.
  On the top of that, the usability of geo-location redirects is debated (how annoying you realize they are when you travel abroad and try to access your usual news sites!).
  What I would do: put some more SEO effort to rank the .de site for German language as well, link the two sites (a language/country switcher link would be my preferred choice).
  A complementary option is, if you want, to suggest to German (or German speaking) users via an overlay dialog to go to the German .de site; not my favourite option, especially since that could be seen as interstitial, but for example that's what softonic does. I added this last option just to give you a broader spectrum of possibilities.
• 
  Ronni Hansen: Good idea with the language/ site switcher.
  
  I really want to keep the geo redirect.
  1. Its not gonna be a issue for my type of users, because they are not making orders "out of office" :-)
  
  2. Is there a way i can make it work with tagging the redirect/ not directed traffic?
  
  Thanks for all your input
• 
  Jim Munro: From the expert panel in this week's SEO Questions hangout on air on 00:32:13 into the YouTube video: https://dumbseoquestions.com/q/questions_about_multi_langual_site +Ronni Hansen
  
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