Multinational URLs

[pikka]

Hi

I'm wondering if the following URL structure using subdirectories would be alright to use on a multinational site.

I have local products only in the local language and english.

I plan to use:

• /uk/ - UK product in English (geo target in GWT to UK, href lang="en")
• /fr/ - French product in French (would geo target this in GWT to France, and hreflang="fr-FR")
• /fr-en/ - French product in English (no geo-targeting, hreflang ="en")
• /de/  - German product in German (would geo target this in GWT to Germany, and hreflang="de-DE")
• /de-en/ - German product in English (no geo-targeting, hreflang ="en")
• /at-de/ - Austrian product in German (would geo target this in GWT to Austria, and hreflang="at-DE")
• /at-en/ - Austrian product in English (no geo-targeting, hreflang ="en")

Does the name of the subfolder matter? I've tried to keep the URL's shorter, so german users in Germany would get just /de/ rather than /de-de/, and have made the english version of the content the more ugly URL as it's used much, much less.

The URL structures aren't really consistent here (ie. uk and fr-en are for english content, but are different in URL format) but I'm wondering if this is an issue, or if the above would be fine.

Thanks!

[ReferralCandy]

Hi pikka,

I believe there is no fixed rule for the name of the subfolder. However, it would be useful to keep it consistent (es-es, en-gb, de-at) and short. There's a question previously on Moz that dealt with this: http://moz.com/community/q/best-url-structure-for-multinational-multilingual-websites

Hope that helps