How to properly implement bilingual website?

Problem with duplicated URLs

[Soso]

Hello,
I am running a news website where I publish articles which are written in czech or slovak language. Those languages are very similar and most of the people in Czech republic and in Slovak republic can understand both languages. All the articles are now at slovakian domain, let's call it www.mydomain.sk. The site's header, footer, and article categories are in slovak language.

Now, I would like to create a czech "face" to this website. I want to achieve the following behaviour: if the user will come to the site from the czech domain www.mydomain.cz, he will be forwarded to the .sk domain, and he will see the very same articles, but with a czech face - header, footer and article categories names will be in czech language.

How can I achieve this without having duplicate content? I plan to forward the mydomain.cz to mydomain.sk, where the user will get the cookie indicating that he came from czech domain. Is that ok? Then, what about the individual articles URL? If the article has the URL:

www.mydomain.sk/articles/345.html

what will be the URL of the same article with czech face? Can it be on the same URL, or should it be modified like:

www.mydomain.sk/CZECH/articles/345.html

What is the best way to go? Thank you for your answers.

[tedster]

Definitely use a different url for each language. This allows search engines to index each language separately. A different domain is not necessary, in my experience.

I work with some content in German (originally in English) that gets significant German language search traffic from google.de, .nl, .at, and .com. It's on the same domain as the English, Spanish, and French versions of the same content -- and they each get their due amount of language-specific traffic from Google and others. We keep each language version in its own directory (/de/ or /es/ for example) with appropriate lang attribute and charset differences, as well as server headers.

If the characters/words are different, then the content is not techincally "duplicate", even if the meaning is the same. But if you use the same url for both language versions, then what can a poor, cookie-less spider do but only index one version.

[Soso]

Hi,
Thank you for the answer. Hovewer, I am still not sure if I explained myself correctly. I think my scenario is a bit different that yours, since my articles are written EITHER in czech OR slovak language. So I do not have the same article in both languages. Would your answer be the same? Thank you.