I'm thinking about starting to translate my web site (no harm in thinking!) and wonder what the best approach to organizing the pages is. As far as I can tell, the possibilities are:
separate domains -
www.mysite.com vs
mysite.es - Registrado con Domiteca.com
subdomain -
www.mysite.com vs espanol.mysite.com
subdirectory (or something that looks like it, faked with .htaccess) -
www.mysite.com vs
www.mysite.com/es/
I've read the previous threads on this topic but they are a couple of years old and I wonder if people have more experience to offer at this point.
The issues - I would like to have my site found by people searching for my keywords in Spanish BUT I am only one person and probably can't translate the entire site and release it all at once. I was thinking of coming up with an organizational plan and adding the translation a little at a time. Ideally I would migrate text to a database and if someone wanted Spanish and I HAD the Spanish for a page, I'd give it to them and if I didn't, they'd get English for that page. This would mean that the page names themselves would be the same, English or Spanish, but obviously the complete URL needs to be different or both versions won't be searchable.
If I recall, incrediblehelp favored a separate domain, but this is more maintenance for me AND I just read that you have to be in Spain to have an es domain, plus I am really interested in reaching Latin and South America more than Spain, so I'm not sure what the extension should be. It also seems like a problem if there is initially a lot of content on the Spanish domain that is the same as on my English domain? I have not found any examples of multiple languages being handled this way (not to say there aren't any, I just haven't run across them).
I have found examples of subdomains and subdirectories. Many of the big sites use subdirectories, and there was an implication that this was bad somehow, though I'm not clear why. I think webnauts was going to roll something out with subdirectories - how did that work out? freetranslation.com interestingly went with a subdomain for their Spanish version. I don't see any particular difference/advantage between subdomains and subdirectories - does anyone else? Cookie issues maybe?
I've shot myself in the foot a number of times in terms of poor choices for urls and ugly stuff getting into Google and would like to make sure I've identified potential problems BEFORE I rush into anything.
Thanks for any thoughts!