Best Search Engine Approach for multiple language sites

Domains vs. Subpages and the indexes that love them

[digitalv]

Hey guys, it's been a while since I've posted on WebmasterWorld, glad to see the community is still going strong ... as expected. :)

I've encountered a situation where I'm not quite sure how to proceed, you search gurus can chime in on this one.

I have my domain, (yep, you guessed it, example.com) which has really good ranking (usually in top 10) and PR8 and I've recently added multiple languages to the site such as example.com/it for italian, example.com/fr for french, example.com/es for spanish, etc.

I also own the domains example.it, example.fr, etc.

I want to list the site on the foreign language versions of all of the search engines, but I don't want to "start over" with a foreign domain with no PR, etc.

So I guess what I'm asking is if there is a way to submit my foreign language versions of the site to the foreign language version of the search engine without it being considered "duped"? I'm not quite sure how to do this.

In other words I would rather submit www.example.com/fr to Google.fr than submit www.example.fr

But if I'm using this "folders" method instead of a domain method, the search spider will pick up the other languages too and I don't want the site to get booted because it's not true to the language. I've just never done the language stuff before and need some direction.

Thanks!

[bill]

Good to see you're still around digitalv.

So I guess what I'm asking is if there is a way to submit my foreign language versions of the site to the foreign language version of the search engine without it being considered "duped"?

That won't happen. SEs are not smart enough to read and compare different language versions unless you're talking about using different versions of the same language. (i.e., EN-US, EN-GB, EN-AU or something along those lines.)

I would rather submit www.example.com/fr to Google.fr than submit www.example.fr

Unfortunately the SE recommended way of handling local language sites for local SEs is to do just that. They prefer either a local ccTLD or a website physically hosted in the respective country.

[JS_Harris]

I'm currently working on the same topic and have the same question. My site visitors are near 70% english and roughly 10% in each of french, german and spanish. I can read all four languages so I started looking into the translation idea when a visitor told me he used Google.de to search for his topics even though he resides in the US.

I've found an efficient way of translating the site into those three languages that also dynamicly modifies the target uri's of my links at the same time.

From an SEO standpoint it would seem that i've just created three new pagerank drains that will lower my existing english rankings. I could "nofollow" the other language versions easily but I want the articles to be found, they aren't much use otherwise.

I've considered browser detecting to switch to the proper language depending on the visitor but thats not effective since spanish users for example won't find the spanish versions during their searches.

Apparently foreign visitors are interested and active on my site, I want to help Google help them find me. They are willing to read in their second languages, I'd love it if they didn't have to. There has to be a way.