First, there is theory and reality. In theory, we all should have them and use as pristine of segmentation as possible and you should on a new deployment. I tend to operate in reality where we are cleaning up messes or scaling to 20 or more countries so that perfect situation is not always possible so we hope for the best and plan for the worst. 87% of the Global 1000 websites all use a .com followed by a country code as .com/cc to symbolize the country. This works in many places except for countries that speak multiple languages like Switzerland and Belgium. Patrick suggest using switzerland.mysite.com/french/product/page.html – this allows you to highlight Swiss content and then use the directories for language variations. This is an option. However, most companies don’t want the overhead nor do they want URL’s that long.

Most large businesses handle this by using the cc_language encoding that was developed by W3C. This means that in Switzerland, you would designate your French content as ch_FR for Swiss French so the URL would be mysite.com/ch_fr/product/page.html – this is much shorter and easy to manage in Webmaster tools. You can set this as content for Switzerland as you would the other 3 language variations.

As far as ccTLD’s – my comment the previous day was that you can host them anywhere. Get them and use them when they are practical from server overhead and deployment perspective. For a multilingual site using them as independent sites can be cost prohibitive even in the cloud environment as Patrick advocated. IF you can do it and afford it – that is the recommendation. I have worked with hundreds of companies in countries around the world and we have never needed to use them so I can’t “require” people to do it.