Multi-Country Multi-Language content website

[phiber]

Hi Community! I'm starting a website that is going to have content from various countries and in several languages. What is the best URL structure in this case?

I was thinking of doing something like:

english name of the plant, content in english, content for USA:
www.flowerpedia.com/flowers/red-roses

spanish name of the plant, content in spanish, content for MX:
mx.flowerpedia.com/es/rosas/rosas-rojas

english name of the plant, content in english, content for MX:
mx.flowerpedia.com/roses/red-roses
this content is not the same as flowerpedia/flowers/red-roses

Content for Mexico would not exist in languages other than english and spanish. So for example:
mx.flowerpedia.com/jp/flowers/red-roses would not exist and it would redirect
to the english version:
mx.flowerpedia.com/flowers/red-roses

What would be the best URL structure in this case?

[OlegKorneitchouk]

Sound like you want a "Flowerpedia Mexico" and a "Flowerpedia USA" (with different content on each) website that you want to offer in both languages (MX in Eng/Spa & USA in Eng/Spa).

If that's correct, what you have seems fine, as long as you are consistent throughout. Just be sure to set the language + country in your hreflang markup for each.

[gfiorelli1]

I think that under the main root of the mx. subdomain the main language should be the Spanish one, not English. Hence, mx.flowerpedia.com/rosas/rosas-rojas and mx-flowerpedia.com/en/roses/red-roses

The reason is simple: Spanish is the main language in Mexico, and English is just a language a percentage of the Mexican population knows on a scholar level.

This leads to a fundamental question: are you really sure is there a search market for an English version in Mexico? From my experience, not at all or, at least, not to justify creating an entire English site for the MX. subdomain. Personally, offering an English version in the Mexican subdomain is useless and just causing your site to have a bloated structure, which is going to waste crawl budget and dilute PageRank.

[phiber]

Ganluca if English in Mexico is an overkill and bloats the structure, what then with the mix of english, arabic and United Arab Emirates?

[gfiorelli1]

That's different, because arabic is not so globally known or spoken, and there's lot of people in UAE speaking only English, so it would make sense having an English version there.