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Either one works, as long as you tell G which one you choose via rel="alternative" Either is fine - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/03/working-with-multilingual-websites.html Mark up multilingual - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/12/new-markup-for-multilingual-content.html

Hi Ari, I believe setting up host only matters now for "site speed", but that factor can be important, if we look at user experience. In rest, as in term of SEO, I believe that less important now. I hope that helped, Istvan

Yes you can not force indexing it is always up to the search engine. In a small site a sitemap is next to useless really. sitemaps help the search engine find and decide what to crawl. in a small site with all pages linked its going to find them anyhow. in a large site it could be a good thing to show what has changed, where to find new links and maybe pages that are not linked.

I guess that's what SEO is all about..you need to test the water and find what works for you :-). Think i'm going to go stick with subfolders for this one! Thanks for getting involved anyway Alan! Cheers Ari