Ranking in France

[derekw]

Maybe Vita or other French natives can answer this for me.

I have just acquired a client that has a big European presence with a domain of .eu - so the client isn't ranking in any specific European country (There is no seo applied to their site).

I have suggested building minisites using ccTLD's to target each country so theirdomain.fr
theirdomain.it
theirdomain.es

So now I want to register the country specific domains and it appears that you can only register TLD's if you are a citizen of that country but you can register second level domains ie; You cannot register theirdomain.fr but you can register theirdomain.com.fr (Hope it's not too confusing

I can get them to register the domains but it means contacting each branch of each country (time consuming) rather than doing it all for them.

So my question is:
How much harder would it be to rank theirdomain.com.fr instead of
theirdomain.fr

Does anyone have any experience with ranking in Europe?

I've been googling all morning but still can't find any info.

Thanks for any feedback.

[modeca]

It's a good idea to host the domains in their respective countries you are targeting. I have a UK and a US hosting account and use these when targeting specific countries.

IF you were Google what would you see more relevant for the French market:

• a .com domain hosted on a server located in a French datacenter, or
• a .com.fr hosted in a UK or US server?