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Dave Smith
Dave Smith

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Setting up a multi lingual website - subdomains or folders?

I'm in the process of creating alternative versions of our website, to be more precise an Italian, French, American English and Spanish versions - with the aim to provide location dependent information for individual locations. There are three setups I can think of but all seem to have their own problems...

  1. Subdomains, so it.website.com, fr.website.com etc. The one bonus with this setup is we could host the subdomains on different servers, and potentially reduce load time by having the American site served by an American server. However in terms of SEO your effectively creating a new website (depending on what you read) so rankings may be more difficult.
  2. Folders, so website.com/it/ etc. The bonus with this setup is that your building on you main websites reputation, so in theory should be easier to rank, interestingly this is the method apple use. However the one downside is the site would all be served from the same server location? So load times maybe affected?
  3. The third option is really the same as the first and has the same advantages, using website.it, website.fr but has an obvious additional outlay for the domains.

Thanks for any help.

Dave

Upvotes: 1

Views: 71

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