What is the advantage of putting the language indicator into the URL?

Question

Hello,

I'm doing a site which supports multiple languages. At the moment, I’m doing like /en/… in the URL path and using .htaccess to determine which language the user is on. Actually, this is very common for sites with multiple languages to either do http://en.example.com or http://example.com/en/.

My question is: Why is it so common to show in the URL which language the user is viewing? I can't see any technical advantages. Is it for optimizing user experience?

Because you could easily just use sessions/cookies and hide it from the user which I'm leaning to at the moment.

Thanks in advance :)

Answer 1

For easy bookmarking probably. Specifying the language information in the URL is 1 way to indicate that you want to view in that particular language, ignoring your current locale.

Wrapping this information in the URL is better than using a cookie for example, as some users may delete all cookies after each browsing session. And because of this pseudo REST like URL, /en/, it is easily bookmarkable, and search engine friendly

Answer 2

I think it's used as a substitute for not owning the domain within each TLD. (ie company.co.uk and company.com).

It's also usable because of the uri's possibility to be localised: ikea.com/se/stolar could be the localised variant of ikea.com/en/chairs; usable both for the end user and SEO.

Answer 3

If you put it in the URL the search engines will store every page in every language. If you use cookies, they will only store one. So it's more a SEO advantage I think.

Answer 4

It is not directory, but mod_rewrite - such url as:

http://google.pl/en

gets rewritten server side for:

http://google.pl?lang=en

and for every language it will be more handy.

Why? Because if client saves link to our page in favorites and sends it to his friend, he can pass also the language of the page he was viewing. If the default language was for example polish, and he changed it to english, he saves friend some time to search and click specific button.