Strategy for different language websites

[malcolmcroucher]

What would the strategy for different language websites be ?

1. Create a sub domain : italian.domain.com
2. Createa a directory : domain.com/italian/index.html
3. Create a site in italian : domain.it

regards

Malcolm

[Fortune Hunter]

Createa a directory : domain.com/italian/index.html

This is how I would do it and on the main site simply have icons of flags or links in the native language that show people where to click to get to the sub pages.

I would highly recommend you don't simply resort to using a translation program that will translate the page info on the fly as these programs make a lot of mistakes. It is much better to have a professional translator do it and set up the sub-domains.

[badbadmonkey]

Pain in the *ss isn't it?

What's more, Google will have to index all the content separately, and you hope it gets it right and presents the correct address to any given browser in Italy (per your example).

I have a similar problem, and the secondary problem of a website which has different content depending on region (dynamic changes to various info). Google has no way by which to tell it that "all these URLs are variations on the same content and you should present the searcher with URL A for region A, URL B for region B", and so on.

The only solution is to cloak the damn regionalized URLs and pretend to Google that it's all the same. So that will negatively affect results for non-US visitors, and of course you can't do that with different languages.

Dare I say it, Americans think the world ends at their borders.

Anyway, the answer to your query. I would have an English default homepage. Or at least cloak it and present that to Google. From that you have "different language" links to subdirs. That way, links to your site to pages in varying languages will all be to the same domain, not spread amongst many. Oh and I think Google et al are usually clever enough to guess, but I would definitely set the correct meta tags etc for what the language of the page is. Likewise for PDFs (you need Acrobat 8+).

[badbadmonkey]

Oh and don't use the word "Italian" for Italian. LOL. If anything, "Italiano". You want to present the idea to your visitors that you care about their locality.

Preferably use the 2 or 3 character ISO codes, look them up.

domain.com/en/
domain.com/it/
domain.com/fr/

etc