Different language versions of site - best structure?

[fishfinger]

We have just completed a small site in English - 44 pages, and have been asked to provide 4 more language versions.

The site is a new UK hosted .com, has few links (yet) and so I'm concerned about Google indexing the foreign language versions at the expense of the new content we're trying to get included and ranking. UK audience is the priority.

Last I heard, number of pages indexed related to incoming PageRank. Is this still correct?

If so, will new pages in other languages put any of the English ones at risk of losing inclusion based on more thinly-spread PageRank?

I don't really want to rel=nofollow the foreign language links as we'd like the content to be accessible to people in other countries.

So I'm thinking that subdomains for each language might allow indexing of the foreign content but not at the expense of de-indexing on the master domain. Is this correct? Grateful for any advice, this is a new area to me.

[tedster]

I recently expanded an English site into 9 other languages using dedicated directories for each language version. We saw no problems with the English site, only gradual indexing and improving traffic for the new directories. That's just one experience, but I doubt that you should be concerned.

I should mention there have been some reports that page-to-page crosslinking between languages has created some troubles, but I've never set thing up that way. Just links to the top level index page for each language.

[fishfinger]

Thanks Tedster. We were actually planning was page to page linking, so that from any page in the site you could jump to any one of 4 other language versions so people wouldn't lose their place in the site.

Perhaps the best solution then would be to only show Google the links to the sub-sites from the home page and rel=nofollow all others?

Can anyone else share their experiences?