Making multilingual site SE friendly

[anttiv]

Hello,
I'm new to this and I was thinking if there is a better way to display the urls of my multilingual site.

Currently the urls look like this:
mysite.com/index.php?lang=en
mysite.com/index.php?lang=de
mysite.com/index.php?lang=it
and so on...

If I get a link to mysite.com/ does it affect the page rank of all language versions?

Is it more search engine friendly to make it like this:
mysite.com/en
mysite.com/de
?

[onfire]

Hello anttiv

I am about to add German to my site and i will use

mysite.com/de for my German pages and keep mysite.com/

Which i believe is ok.

Anybody care to add to this?

[bull]

Using german and english versions on one site, only distinguished by filenames, e.g. "widget-blue-d.htm", "widget-blue-e.htm". On each page a link "this page in english" and "diese Seite auf Deutsch". Works fine - good internal crosslinking. Language-based javascript redirects in each index.html with appropriate noscript section.

[ThomasB]

using subdirs or at least URLs without "?" is more SE friendly. Many SEs understand "?" these days and claim that they don't have a problem with them, but in reality there are still lots of sites not-index due to the "?" in the URL.
If you have the possibility to work without them, leave them out.