I had a client ask to me today "What is the best way to optimize my site for 6 different languages?" I wanted to run my basic thoughts behind it through this forum and make sure I am not missing anything. (all my previous clients have always wanted English/US focused search results) To make this easier I am going to bullet point some information Client already has an oldish (5 years) domain with a fair amount of established trust He is looking to sell the same products in multiple languages He wants to use essentially the same content in those languages I assumed the best way to do this would be to create seperate sites on the same domain. For instance: if example.com/index was his english based homepage include example.com/sp/index and so on for each additional language. or would creating new sites under country specific tld be a better way to about about this? (I did some hunting of major corporations and it seems to be split on which approach they take) My biggest concern is using the same content in multiple languages-- will this trigger any sort of duplicate content penalty or have search engines not gotten that sophiticated yet (in your humble opinions)? I apologize if this has been answered before but my search pulled up nothing.
if you have ever used google's translation you will know there is no way google can detect if the article in different language the same
MrPenn ... You should be okay using the same content in different languages, don't worry about that. Now I would potentially recommend you use a different struture for your content instead of the example.com/sp/index.html. I would suggest you use something like what wikipedia.org uses as it will not only organize your site a little better (structurally sound) but also provide you with other avenues for SEO. ie: http://www.wikipedia.org/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauptseite http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portada http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accueil Hope this helps!
In my own project, I didn't use additional subdomain or folder for different languages. Instead, I use cookies to determine what language to display. The good part is it makes maintenance easy for me. I get to store all my text in the same file. What sucks now is SEO. There's no way non-English search engines can see non-English content. I'm beginning to regret this and looking for an alternative that's SE-optimized and easy to maintain.