Multi Language websites!

[willyg]

Hello,

What is the best way for a website to have more languages?

For example

www.site.com is in english BUT the content will be translated in other 4 languages .es .it .fr  .de    . Should i buy 4 diferent domains www.site1.es  www.site2.it   etc... or create folders  like  site.com/es/   site.com/it  etc  OR create subdomains  es.site.com

Few months ago i was 100% sure..to go and buy diferent domains then to create diferent content on that languages..but now..i am not so sure.

Thank you very much for your help!

[willyg]

Thank you for your advice! What you think.. subomains..or subfolders?  Todd FOster just answered too and he said:

I mean...what's the best solution?

Thank you so much for your help!

[gfiorelli1]

If you offer car rental services only in Romania... the use of country level domain names is deceiving from a user point of view.

In fact, if I click on a .fr domain name, I am waiting to see something related to France (a service, product...).

If I was you I would change the domain name of your site to a .com (or .net) and create language or country versions in subfolders, which I will geotarget via Google Webmaster tools to their corresponding countries.

[willyg]

Hi Maxime and thank you for your reply.  The site is www.auto-rent.ro . Because our clients are not only from Romania,  we have made this site in english...even..it's .RO domain  ... and a romanian version of the site (www.inchirieri-masini-bucuresti.ro).

Now. we want to create another 4 websites ussing 4 diferent domains .de .fr  .es .it  each one with unique content  for our customers who don't speack english or romanian. Our company offers car rental services ONLY in Romania...so we only want to provide good content to our customers in their language.

This is what we are trying to do...

Thank you and sorry for my english...

[Maxoulala]

Again, it depends of your ressources and your strategy...

Can you tell us more about your company and your international strategy?

Would each site be managed by you or by webmasters independantly in each country?

Are you going to use the same brand name in each country?

What ressources (time, staff and budget) to work on the SEO of each site do you have?

And I forgot to mention this article which is worth to read:

International and Multilingual sites: The Criteria to Establish an SEO Friendly Structure

[willyg]

I read everything you said guys... Thank you for your advices..but is still very hard to decide.  Read this and looks very interesting:

" Having this top-level ccTLD, country code TLD, essentially gives you that extra boost in the search engines when you are targeting those international countries. That is why, generally speaking, if you are a big brand, big site, and you've got a big budget, I would recommend getting these specific ccTLDs, building up those country presences around those language groups. "

subdomains and subfolders..cand be an idea...but not so valuable like the diferent TLD domains

[irvingw]

One website is easier to maintain. all locations you mentions are different languages so they will all be unique by default so there are no duplicate content issues. Make the English version the main site root and the other regions subfolders.

[pompano21]

This may help you

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.ca/2011/12/new-markup-for-multilingual-content.html