URL structure for different language pages

[chal00d]

For a number of reasons I intend to soon fold multiple ccTLD’s under a single example.com domain – creating a single, large, multi-lingual site.

I’m reasonably comfortable with the process involved in transferring the history built up from each ccTLD to the equivalent new pages on the .com domain, however I’ve had a few back-and-forth discussions on the best URL structure for the migration…

Option 1: example.com/en/
Option 2: example.com/en-us/

Whilst option 1 would be cleaner, we‘d need to go down the route of having some sites with a “language” URL path, and others with a “language”+“Country/Region” URL path. E.g:
example.com/en/
example.com/en-AU/

Operationally, there is an argument for using full lang + country/region codes across all sites (including the primary domain). It would greatly simplify things, and avoid URL re-writes.

However what is not clear to me is which version would be preferable in the eyes of the search engines. I‘ve not come across any SEO documentation or comments stating which is a preferred method, or if a URL sub-folder is even taken as a signal for geo-targeting a pages of a website.

Just wondering what people’s thoughts are on the SEO ramifications of arranging language pages in the URL?

[tedster]

I have only one experience in this area - with a larger company that has many localized website versions for English, French, German and Spanish, plus many other country versions mostly across Europe.

We advised them to use both a country and a language segment in their URLs, even though in some cases this meant slightly redundant content in the URLs. One big reason was that it helped keep their infrastructure properly sorted. At any rate, it worked quite well at the time (about 5 years ago) and their traffic to various parts of the site seemed geographically well-targeted.

Then, while we weren't working with them, they redeveloped the site and dropped the "two folder" scheme in their URLs. About a year ago they asked for more help - you guessed it, the search traffic was very wobbly in the geographic targeting department.

Based on this one experience, I would recommend using both a language and a country folder in the URL when one domain has many localized versions.