What is the Best way to differentiate between ccTLD’s

Today at Google a question came from a user asking that “how can I tell Google that multiple sites are related? Also, the genuine interlinking of these TLD’s will be treated as spam or paid link by Google? ”. Here in this post we will try to elaborate what Matt Cutts of Google explains in his weblog in the reply for the same question.

Answering this question Matt explained that it’s really hard to find out that the TLD’s are really related with each other and not for spam and paid SEO links purpose. Here he gave an example, suppose you have a main domain “www.yoursite.com” and its ccTLDs like “www.yoursite.de” for the people who are looking in Germany and “www.yoursite.fr” for the people who are looking your website in France. He suggests in his weblog using a “hreflang” tag to distinguish the websites and to tell google to show the precise version in a particular country. By using this Google can differentiate the different ccTLD’s  for the different region and will treat them as related with each other instead of treating them as spam links.

He also explains using a sitemap telling the different version of the website for different country and with different language. For more information please refer the below weblog from Matt Cutts.