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Hi Christy, Site launched! The e-commerce part is still under development but the basic site has been up a couple months. Masked text doing great! No issues whatsoever on the SEO side. Ranking super high still and load speeds are good. Service workers will be activated in the coming weeks as we build out our food delivery platform. So, I'll mark my question as answered. https://www.88k.com.tw

Thanks for the input, Gianluca. I'm actually a dev myself and am about to abandon all these open-source platforms for a static site, but I do need a blog. It's a terrible case really, but there are absolutely no platforms built first on top of a multi-language framework. You either need a plugin, a module, a different store view, etc. Unbelievably short sided in my opinion, but that's where we're at. New open-source packages like Grav and PageKit don't support multiple languages, either. Just baffling! And SEO standards are flat out being ignored even most of the hosted platforms. WTF? FYI, Odoo is an amazing piece of software, but their new CMS is far from ready. There is no URL redirect feature; no structured data; unfriendly URLs with post IDs and underscores; dev unfriendly--you'll really need to dive into the code to make changes, override, or customizations. On performance, Odoo runs on it's own openerp server through a Nginx/Apache proxy. All-in-all, the language support is ok and the design features are pretty cool, but these very capable developers almost completely ignored performance and SEO best practices. In my opinion, it will take years for this platform to compete with Magento or Wordpress as an viable SMB solution. There just isn't an easy migration path to Odoo, and it's too much work for no real advantage over the other packages. Seems like developing a multi-lingual, multi-currency, e-commerce platform that follows current SEO recommendations would be a huge step for mankind. Still looking...

Been spending a little more time in the Moz community recently and though to update this post. In case anybody finds themselves in a similar spot: http://googleblog.blogspot.tw/2010/12/being-bad-to-your-customers-is-bad-for.html This company I mentioned did a fine job of pivoting and grew from $500K to over $8M since I asked this question.

Thanks for the posts everybody. Confirming that I've done everything I have influence over, I guess that settles it. I just tried searching for more on this after reading Matt Cutts, Eric Ward, Joost de Valk, and others SEO pros share different info. On to other SEO issues. Awesome to be back at SEOmoz guys!

Hi SEOPA, Any update on Ultimento? Has it worked out for you through a Magento upgrade? And the Ultimento 3.1 upgrade? Has it been worth the investment so far? Kevin

Ok, problem solved. The methodology in my question was apparently not the right approach. The structure should I had to set up a language folder /en/ and copy my index.php and .htaccess file to that location. Then I modified the index.php file to direct to the 'en' site and changed the base URL in the Magento backend to /en/. Also, I turned off 'add store code to URL'. Now my Taiwan visitors see http://www.88kbbq.com/ and visitors to the English site see http://www.88kbbq.com/en/. No redirects necessary.

I thought about a subdomain, but I think it would complicate things from an SEO standpoint. From what I've learned, a subdomain here would get treated as a separate domain and send link juice to an English page that wouldn't be accessible to visitors direct (only within another Chinese page as a lightbox). I'm sure there's a cleaner way to do this. What I'm looking for is ranking effects of using the Lang element or ATTLIST declaration with lang element to identify various languages on the same page. Or if there is any other way to let search engines know I'm using multiple languages on a single page, it'd be a super time saver. Thanks for all your input so far!