Spanish version of site - best practice?

[TomBristol]

I need to create a Spanish version of an existing site.

My idea was to have the Spanish content switch out the English content if the query string had something like ?l=es. It would also drop a cookie so that all other pages would switch out content as well.

I do want the Spanish content to be indexed and rank in the search engines, though. I would include all of the Spanish versions (with the ?l=es) in the site map and link to them on every page with a link to the Spanish version.

Does anyone have any experience with this? Is this a bad idea?

Thanks!

Tom

[irvingw]

since it's a different language you would be better with duping the site and making a /es/ folder.

this would allow you to use spanish keywords in the file names for better SEO. But you could theoretically do it the way you mentioned.

[Highland]

Are we talking about something focused on a different country or just a different language group? If it's a different country, I would duplicate your site and then buy the appropriate ccTLD. Matt Cutts has indicated this is the preferred method for doing international and there is not penalty for duplication. This also helps greatly with geotargeting.

If all you want to do is add a different language to the same site, I would go with a subdirectory as opposed to a query string entry. Most sites tend to gravitate towards this anyways (domain.com/en, domain.com/es, domain.com/fr, etc.). Based on what Google has said in the past, this is their preference as well.

If neither is an option, Google will still recognize the page a different based on the query string.

[MattAntonino]

Adding onto what Highland said (and I agree, if you are country-targeting, get the .es) but make sure you use the appropriate hreflang tags to tell Google where to find the Spanish version.

Google recommends hreflang when:

• Your site content is fully translated. For example, you have both German and English versions of each page

See more here: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077

[TomBristol]

Thanks everyone. This particular situation is for a local doctor's site who wants to target the Spanish speaking populace as well. In this case, I'll be doing what everyone recommended and putting it into a sub directory /es/. Thanks also to Matt for the additional info on the hreflang. I wouldn't have thought of or found that.

Tom