emd's or multi language site ?

Hello Blackhatworld I had few questions regarding emd and multi language. I will try to explain it clearly:

Let's say i want to sell water guns for kids in US, France, Italy, Spain, Germany.
i have watergun.com and my site is in english.

1) Would you rather keep this website and create watergun.com/fr watergun.com/it ect .
or would you just buy emd domains and make like in french : pistolet-a-eau.com / spanish pistola-de-agua.com ect.
I know it's easier to manage one website ect but i saw many websites translated and they dont rank high in other languages.
I don't care about the costs buying 5 domains versus one. I just want to know if i have better chances to rank and make money with 5 emds rather than one multilingual website.

Thanks for your help !

if you're going to buy multiple domains at least buy them with the right TLDs (es / de / it, etc) as the TLDs are important for rankings. Of course, you should still have the content in those respective languages, and also host the domains on local servers would be even better.

And if you do all these I'm sure that the cost of the domains will be higher than expected, but you're willing to pay so it shouldn't be a problem

In terms of rankings, I think that - like I said - localizing everything (domain, content, hosting, backlinks) the 5 individual domains will have advantage over 1 main domain.

So you probably want to take the separate domains route....

whik06 said:

1) Would you rather keep this website and create watergun.com/fr watergun.com/it ect .
or would you just buy emd domains and make like in french : pistolet-a-eau.com / spanish pistola-de-agua.com ect.

Click to expand...

@tazarbm already covered ccTLDs – yeah, google definitely gives them preference for local rankings

i’d also add that it’s super important to follow hreflang linking rules properly. there are tons of guides online, but you need to be really careful: don’t forget about html pages (like language switchers and meta tags), and make sure to include hreflang tags in your sitemap.xml too. always double-check everything with hreflang validators.

that way, you can be sure google sees it as one unified site with local versions, and passes authority and rankings correctly