mcrystal - 1:26 am on Feb 25, 2006 (gmt 0)

Hi all,

Long time listener, first time caller, as they say.

I run a .com site that's been around since 2003 and is doing quite well in the US SERPs, particularly on Google. It gets crawled all the time and generally seems on Google's good side at the moment.

Now I'd like to translate the site into a few other languages - probably German, Swedish and perhaps Spanish to begin with - and am trying to determine the best way to proceed. I've read through many of the helpful posts in this forum and can't quite figure the right course of action, so I thought I'd post directly.

There seem to be 3 general options for how to proceed from a domain standpoint:

1) swedish.widget.com
2) www.widget.com/swedish/index.html
3) www.widget.se

#1 & 2 have the clear benefit of harnessing the search engine mojo I've built over the last 3 years; Google and other engines may start to crawl and index these Swedish-language pages right away. Starting all over with a .se domain seems really daunting. And it seems that .com's do show up in international, non-English language searches.

What do you guys think? Should the decision be different based on the market? Might I lose some traffic by going the swedish.widget.com approach, but could it still be worth it due to the time, effort and money saved by not needing to start from scratch?

Any and all thoughts welcome. Thanks so much.