What are the benefits to maintain the nice urls for multi lingual sites? I understand that it has to do something with SEO, but what exactly?
+1
A:
If you have similar content in various languages, you can build similar-looking page trees in each language, differentiated only by the "language" string in the URL. You can put language-specific links on your pages linking to the "sibling" page of each page in each other language. So it's an organizational aid for you and it's also nice for sophisticated users who can then choose to go to the site in their favorite language.
Beyond that, it's just a naming convention. You can go with it or not, as you prefer.
Carl Smotricz
2010-04-26 18:00:08
A:
So that search engines can index all languages. So that users can link to the page without losing the language. Because it is the only way to do it.
Coronatus
2010-04-26 18:00:34
Both of the purposes you mention can be achieved in many different ways. A robot spidering the entire site hardly needs (or uses) hints as to which pages belong together.
Carl Smotricz
2010-04-26 18:03:23
@Carl "many different ways" -- examples?
Coronatus
2010-04-26 18:06:49
Nothing stops you from calling your first page "Page1.html", "Seite1.html" "Pagina1.html", i.e. simply using natural language to differentiate page language. Or you could stuff a language identifier directly into the file name rather than the directory path. Your pages will still be "organized" after a fashion, and robots will still find all pages that are linked somewhere.
Carl Smotricz
2010-04-26 18:18:24
That is still a different page, like using subdomains, so is not a different solution at all.
Coronatus
2010-04-26 18:48:04
+2
A:
It is basically just an organisational aid.
You can just as easily organise your content into pages like site.com/en/blah and site.com/fr/blah.
Geoff
2010-04-26 18:03:20
+1
A:
If you maintain language options in subdomains, you may simply mirror your entire site structure into each document base. This requires minimal effort in maintenance, and is easy to create.
Also, by putting language options as part of the domain, as opposed to using cookies, sessions, and whatnot, you allow the page to be indexable by search engines, and also provide a permalink to a certain portion of your site that visiters may keep track of.
Subdomains also shorten your domain as opposed to get requests.
Razor Storm
2010-04-26 18:07:02