Question about multi-lingual international site

ok, guys, i really need some advice on this one as its difficult.

Basically, about a year ago, started this classified site. Main domain is www which is the main page. Then, you select your country + your language. for example es-us for USA in spanish or en-us for USA in english.

About a year ago, this was an okay method according to google's guildelines, whether this is still the case, i dont know. Fact is that the ranking is not very good. sometimes it favors en-us pages, and does not rank es versions, other times its the other way around. I also have a feeling some issues with the content may be a problem. for example when i started en-uk, i copied the index page from en-us and replaced the values like the country, currency, cities where you can find the classifieds and all the other obvious data like meta, canonical links, trying to keep the data as unique as possible, etc... + the classified are also totally different.

anyways, what i am wondering is whether the subdomains is the main problem or whether its the actual content pages that are not enough "unique" according to google's guidelines. Question is what is unique? Do you need to make like a whole new site? how do other sites of this proportion do it? surely there must be something I am missing.

If somebody with experience with sites of this magnitude could shed some light on the best approach or some tips that would really help. If you require a sample link to have a look at the site, please do pm me, happy to share it with you.

Thnx

Doesn't sound like you're doing anything against the guidelines. Just because one site ranks well in one country, doesn't mean Google is going to rank all your sites well in all countries. You need to build links from sites in those countries to your subdomains.

If you're not already doing so, make sure you use hreflang (it works), and set the "Geographic target" in Google webmaster tools for each site.

Everything that mentioned above + according Google Guidelines and my own experience its always better to have not subdomains but local domains like comau couk - this is the way google did his local websites...

thnx guys, currently im using lang="en-US" but i will checkout the langref value and see if that is any better.

The correct markup for hreflang is something like:

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="..." />

Presumably, "en-US" is your default English site, if so use a value of "en", so that it targets other English speaking countries, or better yet, if it is the default for all countries and all languages, use "x-default".

The markup can be a little tricky. Make sure you include an hreflang entry for each language including itself. All hreflang entries should be reciprocal.

thnx guys, i did find some information about that in google guidelines. It seems its something new they launched in 2012. I looked at some other sites like tripadvisor, and in the source i can see exactly what they are doing, so this was a good tip. Thnx allot dudes. Unfortunately i cannot post any urls yet, would have shared the info otherwise on here

why not use google translate feature on your website.

cause google translate is not good