Is there any disadvantage (in SEO terms) to using a country-specific subdomain over the country's TLD?

Question

I'm developing a site at the moment which requires localization to a number of different countries. We own our site's name on many of the countries' TLDs (though not all of them). From a developer's perspective, many things are simplified if we could simply redirect all traffic to "domainname.co.uk" to "uk.domainnname.com" (or "domainname.fr" to "fr.domainname.com") — but my boss is concerned that there may be an adverse SEO impact from doing this.

So, I'm wondering if anyone knows if there is indeed any SEO impact from doing this. The country-specific content is still there, just served from a country-specific subdomain rather than the TLD.

Sorry if this is all a bit confusing! If anyone can offer any help, that would be fantastic.

Many thanks.

Answer 1

From the SEO point of view, it is always better to do domainname.com/fr Why? Because all the links to domainname.com/uk and domainname.com/fr are added to the same PageRank. If you have individual domains, the links are diluted between domains.

What Richie says is not right, because you can tell Google the specific geo target using Google WebMasters Tools

Here is an example, searching only sites "from argentina" (.ar TLD) where the top result is a generic .com

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Answer 2

A country-specific search engine like google.co.uk will understand that domainname.co.uk is a UK site, but it won't understand that about uk.domainnname.com.

If I select google.co.uk's pages from the UK option I'd expect to see the former but not the latter.

(Edit: Yes, you can configure this for Google and some other search engines, but there's more to SEO than one or two specific search engines.)