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so what is the best way to handle these?

We want to stay away form the splash home page that forces you to choose your country, but we also have country specific products. So someone in the US should be able to sort the product list to see all the products offered in the US. The same would go for Canada, Australia and Europe.

I guess we can always do the splash page option for the products section instead of the home page.

What do you think?

Use example.us, example.ca, example.com.au and example.eu to begin with. Then, by all means, and also on example.com, let the customer choose in some unobtrusive way. Offer to remember his choice with a cookie, but make it transparent.

I have to agree with Ingmar here, if you’re not going to mirror the exact same content across all languages you’re better of with a splash page and setting a cookie. Splash pages can be annoying, but at least with a cookie returning visitors only have to see it once.

Thanks for both of your suggestions.

The only difference in all of the sites will be the product listings. Because of different country regulations, the packaging and such will be different for each country. The remainder of the site will all be the same.

I’ve decided to include a dropdown in the header asking visitors to choose their country. Since the headquarters are in Canada I will have that as the default location. I’m going to track by cookies for future visits.

The splash page scenario is terrible for SEO so was not an option here.

But better for SEO would be a site on each country domain, as Ingmar and e-man have stated, as the local Google search sites will pick this up better/ give it a higher ranking than a .com domain. You could therefore run the same content on each domain except for the country specific products and any Terms and conditions you need. Should be an interesting project to piece together and I wouldn’t like to think about doing it in anything other than EE!

We are actually planning to start this process of creating translated sites on their unique subdomain. Any tips people have would be greatly appreciated. The key thing is translating via Google or another service without keeping the Google translate URL

Here’s my advice: don’t. As you know, all these automatic translations create sometimes funny, sometimes misleading, sometimes just plain wrong translations. They approach nowhere the quality of a human translator. And while that can be OK if chosen by the customer (if I have the choice between not understanding a, say, Russian website at all, or being presented the gist of it via automatic translation, I might well opt for the latter, but it would ultimately be my choice), it just won’t do for a professional website. If you can’t afford a professinal translation, just present the original English (or whatever).

Some languages are better than others when translated, but I agree they can be rather crappy.