What are the pros and cons of having multiple country code top-level domains (ccTLD) for a single site with the same content and what are best practices in terms of SEO regarding this case?

You could buy the most important ones, e.g. those countries for which your website is translated and redirect them to one single page (normally the .com version)

Good answer Mohammed. That's exactly what I was going to mention.

The answer depends on what you are going to do with the domains. For me, I'll protect my brand buying .com, .org and .net whenever possible, but with hundreds of variations out there, it's nearly impossible to stop people from domain-squatting your brand. From business standpoint, unless you market to a particular country, it's not that relevant to secure a country-specific domain. However, if you are planning to use, say, example.co.uk, to serve content specific to UK audience, then you can redirect that to the specific subdomain/or subfolder of your main site. I.e.: Example.co.uk ---> uk.example.org OR example.org/uk From SEO standpoint, there's no impact redirecting your other domains to your main domain. Obviously, if you have a different content for every domain name, then you need to separate each and every of them. My 2 cents.

You will probably want to read the following: http://searchengineland.com/the-ultimate-guide-to-multilingual-and-multiregional-seo-157838 I tend to recommend consolidating your resources as much as possible, which means using directories or subdomains instead of unique sites for each country. The major benefit of this is that links all go to one site instead of many.

Nothing wrong in that. Just follow right practice, some of them are as follows. Configure Google Web Master tool for every country Try to have diffrent content on each site & have native launguage for each country, eg. French for France Get local links like http://co.uk links for http://co.uk site. This comes at first thing in mind, will add more if I recall any.

Whether or not you get any SEO benefit from owning the same domain in multiple TLDs is a source of discussion. While Google has gone on record saying there may be some influence as well as there isn't any influence SEO specialists don't really agree either. For me, I say what is your end goal by having the domain in multiple TLDs? (This applies whether it is a gTLD, a ccTLD or a nTLD). Are you an international company, or hope to be? Are you trying to corner the market and block potential other users from registering it in other TLDs? Do your customers prefer a different TLD than .com? Basically, Google has said that if you're on a ccTLD and your content is relevant to that TLD that you may get some ranking because of that, but if your content is deemed irrelevant you won't. Now that can be a toughie because your content may be relevant, but maybe you have an address outside that country so Google may deem it irrelevant. Some ccTLDs have residency restrictions, some are riskier than others so buying them just to buy them may not make sense, but in some countries, their country code extension is more used.

Before you start looking at the SEO merits of different setups, you need to really count the cost of setting up what are essentially brand new websites - sure you will be copying across some common text but to do it properly it needs to be localized for that country - translating text on its own is a massive undertaking, and needs to be redone everytime you update the site - then theres all the local artwork. You'll also need to work out how you will route sales enquiries and respond to them to maintain the illusion of being a local business. Some questions worth asking are: How much is this market worth to me? Do I have the money/time/resources to create and maintain a localized site? Do I understand that doing it poorly (Google Translate) is worse than not doing it at all? How sensitive is this market to doing business with an overseas company (the more sensitive the better the business case for a local site)? What company resources are available to assist with localization? Will I be doing this for every new market our company enters? Have I considered other options such as just creating landing pages for this new country, but redirect back to the main .com site for everything else? These are actually more important questions to ask when it comes to setting up multi-country or regional websites.