Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I've come to a crossroads with a multilingual domain strategy.

Most of you know, Canada has two official languages; English & French. I'm trying to decide on two domain structures to handle languages:

1. Create sub-directory folders for both languages:

www.sitename.ca/en/

www.sitename.ca/fr/

Take into account that all page names will be in their respective language.

or

2. Create a single sub-directory folder for French only:

www.sitename.ca

www.sitename.ca/fr/

I'm leaning towards Option #2 because English is our target and want to give those pages more "weight" rather than pushing them down another level (flatter site structure for primary pages). Yes, I could also have all French pages at the root but I think having them a) in one sub-directory is easier to manage and b) SE (specifically Google) likes the division better for languages. I'm just not sure if there's a point to doing it for English too.

Note: There'll be several hundred pages for each language.

What's best practice (of course) and is there a difference if any....or was this just long winded for nothing?

Thanks for any insights.

This is definitely a tough one & unfortunately, you'll have to most likely find a local ISP within each country.

1and1 is international but to get a geolocalized C-class IP you do have to contact each 1and1 country office separately; i.e. if I want a German & Spain IP, I have to call Germany & Spain 1and1 offices (not centralized). They do have great packages & systems but support is sub-par at best (this may have changed from a year ago).

I did work with one company that could potentially provide you geolocal IPs: www.mavenhosting.com. They are located in Quebec, Canada and I was able to get Spain, Italian, French & Germany IPs (I think they get them from 1and1) but had to buy blocks of 5 per country. Price was OK & service again was sub-par. Email works best with them. Unfortunately, the entire site is in French but they do have one or two folks who speak English.

Hope this helps & let me know if you have more questions about Maven.

Cheers