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Sorry for such a late response to this, but I wanted to say thanks for your help.  We'll be moving forward with the targeted language in the URLs. Thanks, crw

Don't worry about it - I've done far sillier things.

Not at all, if the URL language matches the content of the page then it should be even better that using a full English URL. However, I would suggest using domain.com/ar/blog/عنوان بلوق عربية طويلة حقا على شيء مثير جدا للاهتمام for the arabic blog and if there's an english or french version of that page, you can also implement hrelang on them and point them to domain.com/blog/English-blog-title-really-long-on-something-very-interesting Hope that helps!

Dear Thomas and Tom, Based in China, let me share a few things that we've learned regarding the question. For PPC, harder but not impossible to get ADs running if you do not have a local business location in China. If you contact Baidu AD sales in Hong Kong or Singapore I think you will find that this restriction is not as strictly enforced. I've had a few clients who were able to overcome this using this method.  Cannot say it works 100% of the time but worth a try. For SEO, serving in China is very important since due to government related content filtering, anything that is hosted outside of China is considered a content risk and therefore your SEO rankings will be downgraded.  Also, if you host outside even aside from the filtering if the load speed is too slow you will have serious indexation issues. Now where the local registration becomes more important is acquiring an internet content publishing (ICP)... see example on Baidu.com.  You can only receive this via an individual who has a Chinese National ID. This is another factor that Baidu looks for when choosing the ranking of your websites. Hope this helps!

Sorry.  I'm not familiar enough with Wordpress.com's options.

I'd appreciate if someone with multilingual experience can jump in and give some ideas.

Hi Paul, In order to give you an answer about the best international Web structure, could you please confirm: Where's your target audience for your site? Do you want to target the audience of some specific countries (those where you will have the courses from)? Or do you want to target audience that speak a specific language abroad? Could you please confirm the country and language target for each one please? For hreflang tags best practices you can refer to this post I wrote at the Moz blog with examples and a tool to help you generate them. You can still using "self" referral rel canonical annotations in each one of your pages since these won't be seen as duplicated (they will be whether targeting to different languages or in the same language but to different countries) but you don't need to use cross-language or cross-country, as Google describes in their international FAQ. It's important to note that each of your international Web versions should feature specific content optimized for each one of them in the relevant language, targeting its specific audience, from Titles, Meta Descriptions, URLs, all should be in the relevant language, with specific terms used by the visitors you want to attract. This is why doing a full initial research to identify if there's enough volume in each country and language to compensate to build independent Web versions is fundamental. Please, take a look at this International SEO Checklist I published at the Moz blog, that will help you validate each step you need to take for an international SEO process and take a look at the slides of my MozCon presentation about International SEO, where I describe and share resources for each one of them. Thanks!

Hi Michael, For Belgium, if you want to target both the French and Flemish speakers and you have identified that have enough search volume for the keywords that you would like to rank and convert that will compensate the development of these two versions from a technical and content perspective (remember that they will need content in each relevant language), then you would need to enable a directory for each one: www.headoverheels-fashion.com/be-fr/ With content in French targeted to Belgians www.headoverheels-fashion.com/be-nl/ With content in Flemish targeted to Belgians In this case, both directories should be registered and targeted independently in Google Webmaster Tools to Belgium, nonetheless, the data you would get in each will be unique since they will related to the keywords in different languages. You can also use the hreflang annotation for each one of your different country versions to specify its country and language as Google describes here. I hope this helps. If you still have any doubt please let me know!

Thanks for your comments but im looking directly into subfolder option (since TLD not an option and sub-domain considered bad practice from what i can gather after many days research on Moz etc As a result this is what ill issue to a clients development team in this circumstance is as follows for where sites preferred structure is sub-folders/directories: Implement IP sniffing on the home page ONLY Then have Sub-Folders named after the official country abbreviations which will create a better user experience than both country and language i.e. domain.com/us/ as opposed to domain.com/en-us/ or domain.com/en-gb/ etc etc. This way it will only manipulate the homepage crawling and not site-wide indexing issues. 3) Target these folders to the correct countries in Google’s and Bing’s Webmasters Tools. Use the official country and language codes in the Hreflang mark-up as per point 4. Set up site maps for each subfolder and rel="alternate" hreflang= according to Google guidelines. Here's a great tool to help with correct implementation: http://www.themediaflow.com/resources/tools/href-lang-tool/ Specify the content language/country by adding the 'country-language' meta-tags in the html head 6) Link between each country/language version in a crawl-able and visible manner (for SE and Users) 7) Create individual profiles in GWT & Bing Webmaster Tools for each country/language sub-folder and geo-target accordingly Create individual profiles within GAnalytics for each country/language version and configure to track internal activity between different versions 9) Localise content so has US currency, contact details, spelling etc 10) Other localisation techniques ( such as marking up contact details with schema places code) Note RE: HrefLang & Canonicalisation: An extra advantage of using hreflang is that it will provide a degree of canonicalisation. Should canonical tag be employed in the future never so across language versions if site expand into non English versions. More info here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Igbrm1z_7Hk

FYI by setting it to USA, you will more than likely lose ranks in other countries.

There are a few ways to do it that have advantages and disadvantages.  Your best best is probably to serve users based on their location, rather than their language -- since someone browsing in Chinese in another country probably has no use for the China based version of your site. I know that can be done through Javascript, and I imagine there are other ways to do it.  I'm not an expert on that, but there is a lot of information out there about it. Oh, and here's Google's bare bones explanation of the dos and don'ts of Multilingual sites: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en#1.  There's not a lot there but it's important to keep in mind.

The hreflang have to be implemented per page here is a good resource https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077 if you cant upload it on each page then include it in the sitemaps a good tool http://www.themediaflow.com/resources/tools/href-lang-tool/

Thanks a lot for your answers, fantastic! Best regards, Allan

Hi There I no longer see any replytocom URLs indexed - has this been resolved for you? I also crawled your site with Screaming Frog and the replytocoms do not return 404's, they return 200's. -Dan

Hi Sameer, Did this answer your question? Cheers, Christy

Hi Jonathan, Tom has a great response here: "In terms of Baidu, having a chinese domain, like .cn or .com.cn and having Chinese servers certainly helps - but it is not a necessity in terms of ranking on the search engine. However, proving that you have a Chinese presence, specifically a physical Chinese address, can be a real game-breaker, especially for PPC.  You basically need to have a Chinese registered address to advertise on Baidu for PPC and Paid search.  Your application will be halted until you do." http://moz.com/community/q/how-do-china-perceive-a-com-cn-address Hope this helps

Sure. Let me know how it goes