Multilingual Site Version 2 - best strategy?

[supermanu]

We have a website.com that is around 10 years old.
5 years ago, we decided to go multilingual.

We created:

- website.fr (with French language)
- website.jp (japanese language)
- website.com.cn (chinese language)

etc

Our SEO effort (cost, time) is limited and we hardly manage to take care of 4 different websites.

Would you recommend:

1. to keep these websites
2. to put back everything to the root?
=> If 2. with directory structure? with file name structure?

Thank you in advance.

[gn_wendy]

keep.

what I would try to do is find a system where you can maintain the website in one language (english) and then have all translations done separately. Then you can push updates from one site onto the others, pulling the translations out of a database as you go along.

One time cost of setting it up, but you should then have three content-unique mirrors for each language of your site.

of course -- with no knowledge of your site or structure, this might be more trouble than it is worth.

[HuskyPup]

Without knowing anything about your sites it is impossible to advise however are you making any profit out of the three other language sites?

If you are making a profit and further profits are to be made then extra time, effort and expense needs to be incurred IF you want to expand them but if they are not making any profit then why continue with them?

Realistically there are too many variables for generic advice.

[LifeinAsia]

How much are you paying each year to renew the other domains (related to the amount of profit each site generates)? How many links do each of the other languages sites have? How much traffic do you get to the other language sites?