What is the best CMS Approach for Multilingual Versions of Site?

[the-coopersmith]

We have expanded into France and Brazil and now have a someone in-house that can translate to French and Brazilian Portuguese. I own ".fr" and ".com.br" versions of our domain.  We are using Wordpress for our CMS. We are currently publishing about 2 articles a week on English site which we would be translating and publishing through new international sites (when appropriate). We will be changing out photos and videos at times in addition to all the text/copy.

So, before I jump deep into this I wanted to reach out for help regarding the best modern approach to this. Should I use some sort of WP Plugin that will let me manage each of these through 1 WP install or is it better to run each separately through multiple WP installs?

I want to achieve this while...

• avoiding any duplicate content penalties.
• provide easy admin/editor management of publishing content.

Any help/advice is greatly appreciated. Thanks!

[max.favilli]

I recently had to solve the same issue. I don't know if my approach is the best one, but I will describe it.

• I use tags to set the post language, "lang=EN" is the tag for english post, "lang=IT" is the tag for the italian post, etc...
• I wrote a 20 lines WP plugin to add a custom panel in the post edit page, the custom panel show a list of input fields, one input field for each enabled language (in my case were EN+IT+DE), for the language of the post the input field is prefilled with the slug of the post and read only, for the other languages the input field is manually filled with the slug of the corresponding post in the other language. I didn't make those fields mandatory, but you can choose to do so with 1 line of code.
• The language switcher just redirect to it.domain.com or de.domain.com or domain.com.
• You can edit (again just few lines of code) the WP template you use to filter the blog roll according to the selected language, showing all post tagged with that language plus all post without any language tag (that's an arbitrary decision, in your case maybe you want to filter those out, yes not filtering them out you incur in content duplication).

At the end was just few lines of code, and I could even do it myself (I am far from a PHP coder).

In my case I didn't edit the WP template because I am using a different rendering engine, but that doesn't mean much.

I would not use different WP installation, it makes editing cumbersome.

[customerparadigm.com]

In my experience, the best way to do this would be to set up the .fr domain separately as it's own separate WordPress installation, and have it hosted at a hosting company with a presence in France.

However, what's best for SEO sometimes creates more work for administering a site, vs. having it all available from one login in one WordPress instance.

As far as using a .fr domain, there are many schools of thought on this.

This Moz blog goes into the top strategies:
http://moz.com/blog/international-seo-dropping-the-information-dust

Amazon uses ccTld (Country Code, Top Level Domains). For example, Amazon.com, Amazon.de, Amazon.fr, etc.

Apple uses a subdomain / sub-carpet strategy: (i.e. store.apple.com/es)

In my past experience building out eCommerce and other stores, if you host locally, and use different ccTld (i.e. domain.fr), you won't have to worry about the duplicate content issue, as Google and other search engines will see this as it's own site, especially if it's translated (well) into another language.

Here's more on International SEO best practices:
http://moz.com/learn/seo/international-seo

I hope this helps!
-- Jeff

[the-coopersmith]

Wow that is an interesting work around! Thanks for sharing!

[the-coopersmith]

Seems like the safe solution would be to go with separate sites and localize hosting for each as you mentioned.

I just discovered Multilingual Press WP plugin (https://wordpress.org/plugins/multilingual-press/). Looks like it can provide ccTld and ability to manage all through a single WP Site with Pro version. I would lose the potential SEO benefit from local hosting, but efficient management might beat that. Need to dig into this a bit more.

Also, WordPress Multilingual plugin (http://wpml.org) was recommended to me for "folders" or "sub-domain" solutions. I need to dig into this more, but I do feel better about using ccTld for each.

Thanks for all the help and resources!