Internationalization and Translation via il8n

[thongly]

I have a site that has been translated into multiple languages. All the translations are stored on the back end, and accessing the same URL with different browser locales triggers the user's own locale, with a fallback to English.

I have avoided different locale URL's, such as http://en.mysite.com and http://fr.mysite.com - was this the right move for SEO? I feel that it concentrates the links from other sites.

I am wondering how to ask the search bots to index in the multiple languages. Can I even do this, possibly by specifying which headers the bot should use? I presume the default language for Google and Bing is English.

It's my first time translating web app. Thanks!

[john4math]

If they're all served under the same URL, the search bots aren't going to be able to differentiate between the different versions of the pages.  Googlebot primarily indexes from the US, so it's only going to see the English version of the site.  You can't even set up a sitemap or something with the different pages since they're under the same URLs.

The better way to do this is to have distinct URLs for each as you suggested.  You can let Google know these pages are i18n versions of each other using the rel alternate hreflang markup, described here.  With this, you can either set meta tags on each page, telling Google about all of the alternate pages, or describe them in your sitemap.  Google then can swap out the versions of the pages in Google search results to give the user the correct page for their language.

[thongly]

If I were to serve it with different URL's, is there a best practice for that?

Such as:

• French: http://fr.mysite.com
• German: http://de.mysite.com
• English (default): http://mysite.com

and respectively:

• French: http://fr.mysite.com/frenchpage1
• German: http://de.mysite.com/germanpage1
• English (default): http://mysite.com/page1

[john4math]

Some people do subdomains (like you've outlined above), and some do directories, i.e. mysite.com/en/, mysite.com/de/, mysite.com/fr/.  It used to be recommended that you do directories, as they keep your domain authority pooled better, since subdomains each have their own concept of domain authority.  That seems to be less true today, so I'd do whatever is easier for you to set up.  All else equal, I'd opt for the directory structure.