Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks Patrick, the Linkarati article is especially helpful.

Jamie, You should update your sitelinks with Google at least once a month. They know when you've re updated it. A date inside the document shouldn't make a difference. Thanks, - Mike Bean

Yes, this can cause a problem as the links will be classed as unnatural.  The best way to get round this is to make sure those links have the rel="nofollow" tag. The penalty you should be worried about is Penguin, as this will hit pages with overoptimised anchor text links, and a menu link to an external site could generate hundreds, if not thousands of backlinks to another site, so the site you are linking to in that menu could have problems. There are many instances being posted here of people being hit by penguin because they got featured sidebar links on other sites, resulting in 1000's of backlinks appearing in opensiteexplorer, all with the same optimized anchor text.  I liken the menu links to be similar in result. But like I said, just ensure that the mass menu links to the other site are nofollowed and you should be ok.

Just something to add if you want to consider this in your planning scope. My proffesional opinion is surely sub-folders, keeping away from sub-domains (unless for a very specific reason needed). 1. If you are building a multilingual site, you should also consider how you will be building back-links through various methods (content development, company blog, etc) and will those be done in each language to support the authority needed to build rankings in each language you are working to expand on? 2. If you are going to be building different divisions of the domain (Chinese, and perhaps later going French, German, etc), consider building out TLD's for each domain that's needed in specific languages and focus on building those separate sites. That way you can focus on content development, social media and marketing efforts specific to each language, thus improving your options for the search in each country. Just some thoughts to think about depending on the scope of your project and sites. Cheers!