Multiple language website and SEO

[member22]

I have a website www.website.com and intend to make it in a different language with a second address www.website.com/newlanguage is the PR that i have on the homepage going to be transfered to the new page or no ?

and for the SEO do I need to redo all the work that was done for this new page as for the main page ?

Thank you,

[deadsea]

I would recommend using newlanguage.website.com rather than website.com/newlanguage

There are two big advantages to the subdomain:
1) You can target subdomains to the correct audience via google webmaster tools. You can't do that with directories.
2) If you decide you want to host the content in the country where the audience lives, it is possible to move a subdomain to a different host, but not such much a directory.

As far as SEO, you do get some benefit from your existing English site when you do additional languages and link to them from your English site. You, of course, have to re-optimize the keywords you are targeting, as they are different for different languages. You should do some same language link building to be seen as an authority in your vertical for the new language.

[tedster]

I'd say the biggest advantage to using a subdomain is a shorter URL. Google Webmaster Tools does allow country targeting by directory (just verify that directory as "a website") - and webservers also allow a directory to be resourced from another server or IP address via proxy.

Google Webmaster Tools helps you better control the country association of your content on a per-domain, per-subdomain, or per-directory level

[googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com...]
Targeting by country and targeting by language are not the same thing. Google is pretty good about detecting the language of a page automatically without any country targeting. Not using any country targeting allows all users of that language to have a better chance of getting the pages from wherever they happen to be in the world.

I work with one website that uses the directory approach successfully for ten languages. We use the 2-letter ISO language code as the directory name, we include the language meta tag, and we translate all the file names, image names, etc - not just the visible text.

[Simsi]

....we translate all the ... image names

Is that just for completeness or do you think there is a tangible benefit in doing that, Tedster?

[tedster]

I think there's both a ranking benefit altogether, and a click-through benefit in Image Search