What strategy is better for a multilingual site for the SEO point of view?

[webtematica]

Hi everyone, in a case for a site with two languages like spanish and english, how would do you deal with it?

I can see 4 cases, which is better??

1. With differents domains: mydomain.es (for spanish version) and mydomain.com (for english version).

2. With subfolder mydomain.com/es/ and mydomain.com/en/

3. With Subdomain: es.mydomain.com and en.mydomain.com

4 With URL translation (any url is translated in ther languages but not use of subdomain or subfolder): mydominain.com/hola and mydomiain.com/hello

Thanks very much for your answers (i love this forum).

[FrankViolette]

Hi,

I've actually had to deal with the same issue this year. From the research I did a while ago there's one solution that stood out for me.

I went with the sub-folder. example.com/en & example.com/es and made sure that all my pages add the hreflang attribute that points the page with its language info.

The main benefits of using a subfolder is that you don't have to share your domain authority between the different language sites.

Here's some resource to get you started

• Google Official Explanation of the hreflanf tag
• Mozs' hreflang page

[webtematica]

Thanks very much for the answer, i know about the hreflanf, with sub-folder i think for the principal language you can omitted the sub-folder: example.com for spanish and example.com/en for english, but not so sure if that is good.

[FrankViolette]

Yup, I think as long as you specify the hreflang for all languages including the principale one you'll be fine.

[Brando16]

So when implementing hreflang in the head section, do you call out the alternative and main language on every single page?

So for example if I'm implementing Brazilian Portuguese where the main language is English, for my English site it would be:

Then for the Portuguese site it would be:

[FrankViolette]

Hey Brandon,

I would just do en-US and not bother about having just en. See below for example.

For English

For Portuguese

[Brando16]

By using en-US would I be leaving out English speaking users in other countries? I'm wondering if I should use this format:

For English

For Portuguese

[Brando16]

After doing some more research I'm going to go with your suggestion...thanks!

[Brando16]

Does it make sense to target my Portuguese translation for Brazil to Portugal as well? Or do I create another version of the site that is hreflang=pr so that people that speak Portuguese in other locations throughout the world will at least get a Portuguese translation?