Geotargeting: the power of local TLDs vs. combined link juice

[Portoseguro2010]

Hey y'all,

a question on a multilingual setup: I consider attacking a niche in several countries. I have done some homework and research and from what I see the two most promisting strategies are as follows:

Option 1:
* get a local domain with local TLD for each country I will work in. This has the advantage that Google likes local TLDs (example .de) and therefore might rank it higher. Another advantage is that I can try to include the (translated!) keyword in the domain-name (so I'll have schluesselwort.de and palavraclave.es)
* do all the backlinking in each country separatly, just for the specific local site

Option 2:
* create only one site on a generic TLD (.com, .org, .net)
* setup specif subdirectories for each language/country (so it would be domain.com/de and domain.com/es)
* use google webmasters tool and enter each subdirectory separatly, that way I can geo-target one subdirectory for one country, and the other one for another country
* do all the backlinking for each country, linking to the relevant subdomain
* advantage: the domain gets the combined linkpower, i.e. instead of having two domains with 100 backlinks each, you would have one domain with 200 backlinks. Then again, the anchor text would be in one language for 100 backlinks and in another language for the other 100 backlinks. I'm not sure how much weight Google would give to the 100 backlinks that have the anchor text in the foreign language (i.e. would having a link with a Spanish anchor text still help me to improve the ranking for the German subdirectory)

Any thought about which strategy might be more successful?

[Portoseguro2010]

bumpety bump