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i started to rebuild my website which contains a divebase/diveshool
database (until now about 1500 divebases).
My goal is a multilingual, personal and google friendly page!
I red a while in this forum and found some interesting threads
[webmasterworld.com...]
[webmasterworld.com...]
but they didn't answer my questions.
I red about some things like this:
* one domain with many links means many incoming links and a
better ranking
* linking not more than 2 levels from root
* total URL length should not exceed 60 characters
So here are my ideas:
A) each domain comes with the country-specific tld
www.domain.de
www.domain.com
www.domain.fr
...
B) each language comes with a subdomain
de.domain.net
en.domain.net
fr.domain.net
my.domain.net (personal) or each subdomain with cookies
C) one domain with a language root folder
www.domain.net/de/statistic/
www.domain.net/en/statistic/
D) one domain with a language prefix
www.domain.net/de_statistic/
www.domain.net/en_statistic/
www.domain.net redirects to index_de.htm or index_en.htm
or without redirect (like www.sedo.de)
E) one domain only with language links
www.domain.net/statistic/
www.domain.net/statistik/
www.domain.net redirects to startseite.htm or frontpage.htm
or without redirect (like www.sedo.de)
Which solution should i prefer and why?
IMHO
A) and B) is not as good for me
C) and D) is easy with .htaccess and mod_rewrite
E) is more todo with .htaccess and mod_rewrite but has
the keywords in each language
Is C) or D) better?
What is better?
name-of-object.htm or
name_of_object.htm
www.domain.de/country-35_region-12/name_of_the_oject.htm or
www.domain.de/country-35/region-12/name_of_the_oject.htm
.htm or
.html
.net or
.com or
.org
Thanky you,
Maik
Although it would be possible to work with any of the scenarios that you presented I'd put my vote in for A
A) each domain comes with the country-specific tldwww.domain.de
www.domain.com
www.domain.fr
Organizing multilingual content can be done in several ways. There is no one size fits all approach.
The one thing to look at first is the overall goal.
Whom do you want to target?
If your aim is to reach out to visitors from different lingual areas, building a strong presence in more than one country, then you should go for seperate domains, running under the local ccTLDs.
Basically visitors, search engines, directories and linking partners should view your site as being an original site in their language.
Going for seperate domains is in many ways the best approach in terms of SEO. It gives you the opportunity to build a perfectly legitimate network of sites, which can all be promoted seperately, getting multiple listings in directories like ODP, Yahoo, as well as listings from local directories.
Domains can carry your keywords in all languages at the root level. With local ccTLDs your are fairly safe to get into all local search engines. In a perfect scenario you would also go for local hosting, but that is often very difficult with dynamic sites.
The best alternative to the fully localized approach just described would be to set up your main site with subdomains for each language.
This is an option especially for sites with strong branding. It has some shortcomings in terms of SEO to local directories and search engines, but works out okay in most cases.
Some huge sites mix both approaches. Notice how Yahoo promotes their local sites as full local domains, a la [yahoo.local_domain...] , while really the setup is [local_domain...]
