URL strategy for multilingual website

Question

Hello! I was wondering what would be the best URL strategy for a multilingual website (for an Italy based company).

I was thinking about site.com/it and site.com/en, not showing any content at site.com and redirecting the visitors to the localized site when they try to access site.com.

What about buying an additional domain, site.it, and then redirecting to site.com/it?

Are these good ideas? If so, regarding of SEO, which are the best redirect methods for both site.com (to site.com/en or site.com/it) and the additional (if available) site.it (to site.com/it)?

Thanks, Silvio

Answer 1

All moreor less the same. Depends on technology etc.

Approaches are:

• site.it, site.com etc.... problem - these reflect countries, not languages. where do you put english? german (germany, austria?)
• site.com/it, site.com/en, site.com/de etc. - basically folders
• it.site.com, de.site.com, en.site.com - subdomains, used for example by wikipedia.

from a SEO point of view there is no difference.

I would go with subfolders or subdomains, NOT with different domains - reason: cookies, common login code etc. is a lot better if you ahve a common domain to hook them up to.