International (foreign language) URL's best practices

[mongillo]

I'm curious if there is a benefit or best practice with regards to using the localized language on international sites (with specific ccTLDs).  For example, should my french site (site.fr) use the french language as keywords within the URLs or should they be in english?

e.g. www.site.fr/nourriture  vs. www.site.fr/food

Is that considered best practice for SEO (or just for brand perception those markets?).  Is there a tangible loss in SEO if we do not use the correct language for those URLs and just stick with English around the world?

I recall seeing a Matt Cutts video on the topic and he said that google does support i18n URL's but other SE's might not support them as gracefully but he didn't come down with a hard recommendation to go with i18n URL's or just English.

Would love a strong ruling in favor one direction based on best practices.

[jim_cetin]

hi

if you want your site indexed on google.fr then leave it with french, but if you want both, so with englisch translation and on google.com, then I'd suggest the following structure:

www.site.fr/nourriture & www.site.fr/en/food

it's up to you in which language you create your site... Google does not care, they can translate

cheers

[rayvensoft]

All my sites are in multiple languages - including french - and I have seen much better results when I translated the file names into French instead of leaving them in English.  So for example I have found that:

www.mywebsite.com/bonjour.html

performed better for relevant French language searches than

www.mywebsite.com/goodmorning.html

This has held true for me in all the languages.  Even in Chinese and Russian, I write them out with latin characters and it seems to make a difference.

I hope this helps.