Multilingual site - separate domain or all under the same umbrella

[seo-cat]

this has been asked before with not clear winner.

I am trying to sum up pros and cons of doing a multilingual site and sharing the same domain for all languages or breaking it into dedicated subdomains

e.g. as an example lets assume we are talking about a french property portal with an english version as well.

Assume most of the current incoming links and traffic is from France.

A) www.french-name.fr/fr/pageX for the french version

www.english-name.com/en/pageX for the english version

B) www.french-name.fr/fr/ for the french name (as is)

www.french-name.fr/en for the english version

the client currently follows approach A but  is thinking to move towards B

we see the following pros and cons for B

• take advantage of the french-name.fr domain strength and incoming links

• scalable: can add more languages without registering and building SE position for each one individually

• potential issues with duplicate content as we are not able to geotarget differenly on web master tools of google

• potential dilution of each page's strength as we will now have much more pages under the same domain (double the pages basically) - is this a valid concern?

• usability/marketing concerns as the name of the site is not in english (but then people looking for a house in France would be at least not completely alien to it)

what are your thoughts on this?

thanks in advance

[RyanKent]

All things being equal, the approach you labeled as "B" is recommended.

The biggest concern I have is choosing the ".fr" domain to accommodate non-French countries. Google restricts the flexibility for geo-targeting country specific domains. If you can use your .com domain then implement your plan, that would be best. I realize this is a french company but the .com domain would be strongly preferred for any form of international business.

The doubling of pages is not a concern. It is fine to duplicate the site within a country folder as long as the content is properly modified to target the specific country. This includes more then just a pure language translation. There are units of measurements and cultural changes to be considered as well.

[seo-cat]

Thanks Ryan

That's a good point about the fr domain name

In the example the content is about France but still the audience would be international.

[ReneReinholdt]

Google have written allot about this subject and cuffs debated it one of his vids, here is a few links:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/03/working-with-multi-regional-websites.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPiALaxDr6E

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ets7nHOV1Yo