Best structure for multilingual site

Hi,

I am setting up a website in multiple languages.

for the development I simply store the language to use in a session variable. However I know this is not good for search engines.

So I was wondering what the best way to do this.

I had 2 ideas

1. subfolder http://www.mydomain.com/en/PAGENAMESGOHERE

or

2. subdomain http://en.mydomain.com/PAGENAMESGOHERE

Which one is the better one? Or is there another option??

Thanks for any advice.

 

i should do none of the above, instead you should use cookies, if no cookie is detected you should generate your default language, offer in the header clickable links to other languages and set them in a cookie so you can change content!

 

http://www.kirupa.com/forum/showthread.php?340564-Multilingual-php-site-Example good example

 

I didn't really ask about how to detect the correct language. I asked how to structure the site the best. And to have the same url for various languages is bad and can confuse search engines.

 

Source: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=182192#1

Really good info really on how to structure multilingual sites

 

and some more info including on sitemap
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/multilingual-and-multinational-site.html

 

And another page
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/new-markup-for-multilingual-content.html

 

ok after reading quite a bit about this I have decided that I will opt for the subdomain route.

main domain will be in english and all other languages will be as subdomains. then giving the option to change the language where they will simply redirected to another subdomain or main site. I think that should work well

 

Use sub-folders such as /es/ /fr/ etc.

 

any particular reason to use subfolder rather than subdomain?

 

It's better for SEO because it's on the main domain.

 

I see.

Thanks.

 

I have set it all up now. Works like a treat.

 

I also think it natural and better for SEO using subfolders instead of subdomains. Why? Because it it still the same website with the same content, only languages are different.