A multilingual site - one domain or several domains?

Question

Which one is best for creating a multilingual website if you want the most effective SEO?

Use single domain?

www.domain.com/en www.domain.com/de www.domain.com/dk 

Or use multiple domains, one for each language?

 www.domain.com www.domain.de www.domain.dk 

Answer 1

If you have multilingual content, you should follow Google’s new multilingual guidelines . Basically, you use subdomains for different translations:

To explain how this works, let's look at some examples of URLs: http://www.example.com/ - contains the general home page of the website, in Spanish http://es-es.example.com/ - this version for users in Spain, in Spanish http://es-mx.example.com/ is the version for users in Mexico, in Spanish http://en.example.com/ is the general version in English On all of these pages, we could use the following markup to indicate the language and possibly region:

 <link rel="alternate" hreflang="es" href="http://www.example.com/" /> <link rel="alternate" hreflang="es-ES" href="http://es-es.example.com/" /> <link rel="alternate" hreflang="es-MX" href="http://es-mx.example.com/" /> <link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="http://en.example.com/" /> 

If you specify a regional subtag, suppose you want to target this region. Keep in mind that all of these annotations should be used for each URL. You should take care to use a specific URL, not the main page, for both of these link elements.