.NET life

When designing a multilingual website, the representation of different languages in URLs is an important aspect of design. Indeed, how to separate the languages are often implemented in the heart of the project and any changes would result in heavy maintenance. The worst thing is to not consider this point at all. Companies not taking the time to prepare for internationalization will be later forced to incur significant costs when the whole site must support multiple languages.
This article describes a non-exhaustive list of techniques for implementing a multilingual site with the advantages and disadvantages of each.

Country-specific TLD

A different domain for each language.

Examples:

• mysite.fr
• mysite.de
• mysite.es

• The cost to register domain names are recurrent and proportional to the number of languages.
• A country has not always one language (eg Switzerland or Belgium).
• The obligation to access to DNS management.

Language-specific subdomains

It uses a language code as subdomains on the domain name of the main site.

Examples:

• fr.mysite.com
• de.mysite.com
• es.mysite.com

• A single domain name to own.
• A language is not always used by one country and yet the contents may need to be different in these countries.
• The obligation to access to DNS management.
• The organization is simple and clean.

Directory structure according to the languages and countries

The directory structure reflects the language and/or the country. This can be achieved with physical directories or with URL Rewritting.

Examples:

• www.mysite.com/en/
• www.mysite.com/ch-fr/
• www.mysite.com/es/

• Maintenance can be cumbersome in case of separated physical directories.
• URLs no longer reflect only the content of the page but also other properties such as country and language.
• Ease of implementation especially with a rule rewritting URL.

Using QueryString to determine the language and the country

You use the QueryString to pass to the page the desired language. It's certainly what a rewritting rule will do with the previous technique.

Examples:

• www.mysite.com/?lang=fr
• www.mysite.com/?lang=ch-fr
• www.mysite.com/?lang=es

• Bad for SEO because pages are considered as static with variables contents.
• URLs aren't cleaner.
• The semantics of URLs is abandoned.

Conclusion

The combination of several of these techniques, in my view, is essential to obtain the best result in terms of ease of maintenance, possibility of extension to new languages and especially to search engines optimization (SEO).

By combining a country-specific TLDs and subdomains specific language, you can have a content by language and country.

Examples:

• fr.mysite.ch
• de.mysite.ch
• it.mysite.ch
• www.mysite.fr
• www.mysite.de
• www.mysite.it