How best to organize multilanguage on the website, through subdomains (en.mydomain.com/index or ru.mydomain.com/index) or better simply by adding part of the path (mydomain.com/ru/index or mydomain.com/en/index) ? I will add that the site is not very big and at the expense of "better", it means indexing by search engines and further work by SEOs.

    2 answers 2

    I would choose subdomains. Looks neater, plus there is a clear separation according to language features.

    You can, of course, make a division on the basis of a single domain, but I don’t like this idea very much, simply because there will be pages in different languages ​​in the general list of site pages.

    If you do not apply, you want all the pages of your site to be on a level 2 domain, you can register several domains. For example comru.ru comen.com and so on. The idea is perverted, but such sites are also found (for example, Yandex, Google).

    Shl. Most major language sites use subdomains. But some do in other ways.

    • if the site is small, I'm afraid that the subdomain will be led away by traffic, which will not be very much anyway. - ashalbulk
    • @ashalbulk, what's stopping you from keeping general statistics on the main site and subdomains? Yandex.Metrica and Google analytics provide the opportunity to do this. - anj1817

    The choice between a subdomain or a “folder” will not play a big priority, since an explicit definition must be specified for the robot.

    To do this, you can use canonical links (main ones); they are set using rel = "canonical" in the head of the page, separately for the Russian language and separately for the English language,

    <link rel="canonical" href="/ru/downloads"/> <!-- русскоязычная версия --> <link rel="canonical" href="/en/downloads"/> <!-- англоязычная версия -->

    this way robots will identify both links as original content. For users it is best to implement the choice of language on the page, because they will be reluctant to prescribe something at the beginning of the domain or at the end.

    You can explore this aspect in more detail at https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en

    • The idea is good and uniquely correct, but why implement the choice of language? After all, some users may fall off after seeing the login page in a language other than their own? We immediately redirect to the version of the site in the appropriate language. Thus, the user does not have to choose the language himself. Of course, the switching function must be provided, but it is better that this is done automatically. - anj1817