Is language string in url good for SEO?

[neophyte]

Hello All -

Doing a new multilingual project and am at the stage where I need to decide if I'm going to insert the locale string (en-us for example) in the url, or keep it hidden away in a session.

I've done some googling about this and there seems to be a split opinion over whether it's advantageous (regarding SEO) or not to have www.example.com/en/us/link/to/some/page vs. the more typically seen www.example.com/link/to/some/page

Would appreciate any insight/guidance/opinions regarding this topic.

Thanks to all in advance

[aakk9999]

It is bad to have it hidden away in session - I would not do it.

If you have multilingual site, then having language as a folder in URL is a good approach, however I would not use /en/us/ and instead I would only use /en/

You can then use rel alternate hreflang link element to tell google what is the URL of the page of alternate language. The rel alternate hreflang link element can also be self-referencing for the current page.

Here is Google's guide on this:

Multi-regional and multilingual sites
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en [support.google.com]

[neophyte]

Hello AAKK -

Thanks very much for the reply as well as the link... interesting reading and will be including the language string in the url.