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Angie530

: Best practice when translating sites into multiple languages - new domains? For the same website I've got 3 domains: .fr, .com, and .co.uk. To start with it was to avoid people buying the same

@Angie530

Posted in: #Domains #Multilingual #MultipleDomains

For the same website I've got 3 domains: .fr, .com, and .co.uk. To start with it was to avoid people buying the same name.

I used have my content in French only and redirected all the traffic to the .com using 301.

Now I've got all my content translated from french wonder what would be the best thing to do:

domain.fr: French content domain.com: English content


or keep the 301 and go for

domain.com/fr/: French content domain.com/en/: English content


The obvious seems to use .fr for French and .com for English, but what's about the co.uk?

I'm planning on get it translated into Spanish and German, using

/fr/
/en/
/es/
/de/


It will be easier and cheaper than buying more domains.

I'm planning to do my change in 2 weeks and once it's done, unless I start to create long and painful rewrite rules, I will lose my Google rank.

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@Megan663

From an SEO perspective, Google supports internationalized sites on top level domains, sub-domains, and in folders. It is possible to release multiple English sites for US / UK / CA / AU, etc. You would have to use appropriate spelling on each.

Top Level Domains


Most expensive - you have to buy example.es, example.de, example.com.au. In addition to the registraton fees, you will probably have problems with squatters. It can be time consuming.
Users often react most favorably to these, as they like browsing on a familiar TLD
You move hosting into the country that you are targetting by changing your DNS.
You have the option of localizing your brand name by buying a different name in a particular country. In some cases you may want to change the spelling.
You can't share cookies across all your sites
Since most TLD registries are by country, it makes more sense to internationalize by country than by language. Otherwise do you put the Spanish site on .es or .mx?


Sub-domains


Cheaper than TLDs
You can still move the hosting
You can share cookies across all your international sites
May look "translated" to users and users may react less favorably
You can choose to internationalize by language or by country


Folders


Similar to sub-domains, but you can't move hosting closer to international users

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