Hi Guys, i have a website which is available in 20 different languages and just think about which is the best SEO - site structur? every language on another subdomain http://de.domain.com http://fr.domain.com http://en.domain.com ^ every Subdomain has it's own ranking. or better: http://www.domain.com/de/ http://www.domain.com/fr/ http://www.domain.com/en/ does google learn that there are different languages? SEO is quite easy because i just need to optimize just one domain. whats your idea?
Second option can be a bit confusing for google, sometimes. The first one is better in my opinion, but needs much more investment to get good position for particular languages.
subdomains are new domain for search engines. if you want to get better serp results in a short time using urls like domain.com/en/ is a better option
Yes but I think it's on site/domain level and not on page level. My pinball site first ranked very bad in google (dutch and english pages on same level, linked to each other). Probably google went to the index page, thought the whole site was english, and when crawling the dutch pages thought it was garbage text and therefor I did bad. I put on every page the lang meta tag and it quickly ranked a lot better ! (see my blog for info about this). Therefor I think subdomains will be best, one for each language. Subfolders may also work but then certainly put the lang meta tag on each page. Don't make the mistake I made and put everything on the same domain/folder.
I'm guessing the first one...I see lots of subdomains with good rank. are you using specific software to generate multi-lang sites or paying someone to translate?