geographical redirection, currencies, hosting etc

[christina]

I've had a good dig round on here & the KB but can't find specific answers but apologies if this topic has been done to death

I have a site built in v.9 business plus that sells giftware & is closely affiliated with a social networking website. Because of the multi-national flavour of the site members I need to introduce multi-currency payment options.

From a thread a couple of pages back & my own research it looks like I need seperate sites for each currency.

So how do I direct customers to the most relevant site for them? Also how are search engine rankings going to be affected - will I be clobbered for product duplication? The sites won't be mirror images of each other, there will be some variation in product ranges.

At the moment the site is on a .com domain (as a sub domain of the social networking site) & hosted in the UK (by actinic).

Am I better to switch the hosting, domain names etc around. I was intending to use eu.shop.domain.com, uk.shop.domain.com etc.

Thanks
Chris

[leehack]

Multi-lingual sites usually offer flags of the various countries, which the user selects to choose which language they want to see the site in. Once clicked they get taken to a URL hosted in that language. I've seen sub-domains used, multiple separate domains and also dynamic sites that keep you where you are but change the content to suit. Personally I favour the separate domains, as I think they are better for country specific searches completed by users.

Duplicate content penalties are generally when you are trying to fool or manipulate the SERPS, if you have a central portal pointing to each of your sites, it's hardly underhand and with differing content on each, I don't see an issue.