Backlinks to URLs with Language Parameters (for Chinese version of website) and SEO?

[ExperienceOz]

Hey all,

We run a large eCommerce site in Australia and are preparing to launch to the Chinese market. Our site has been fully converted to Chinese and displays the version of the site detected as default in the user's browser unless they manually select otherwise. This is done by appending the parameter "?la=zh" onto the end of the URL, so for example the Chinese version would be:

**www.example.com/australia?la=zh **

This then forces the product catalogue to display the relevant language version.

My question is, for SEO purposes and back links in particular, since they aren't really a "true URL" (i.e: strictly speaking they aren't different "pages", just the same page being populated with different characters), would getting links from Chinese websites to the URL "www.example.com/australia?la=zh" really be viewed as any different from just "www.example.com/australia"? Do they pass the same amount of juice and is the difference detected by the engines (thinking mainly about Baidu in particular but of course Google as well)?

Feedback from anyone with experience in SEO for multi-lingual sites would be much appreciated, thanks.

[MoosaHemani]

Never worked for Chinese version but as far as search engine Google is concern it will count these two URLs as separate URLs.

I mean URL: example.com/Australia and example.com/Australia?al=zh will be considered as different URLs and if the content is available in different languages then there will no duplicate content issue and link juice for both pages will be separate.

Hope this helps!