SEO: Subdomains or subfolders for Wiki?

Question

I'm currently working on a multilingual Wiki and need to decide if I should use subdomains or subfolders to separate each language.

I know that most people would normally recommend subfolders for SEO. But since Wikipedia is using subdomains, I was wondering if subdomains would be a better approach, since it will help differentiate the search results for every language and probably pay out in the long run when it comes down to the Top 10 search results.

Answer 1

the pros and cons directly from google http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/03/working-with-multi-regional-websites.html advice will not get any better than this.

Answer 2

There are two different issues here: the way your Wiki is structured, and the way your URLs are structured. In MediaWiki, it's recommended practice to set up a separate instance for each language, since this:

• Allows easy interwiki linking
• Makes it easy to default the interface language to the content language
• Stop search results from bleeding across languages (search in the French wiki, get only French answers)

The way this is shown to the user, on the other hand, is your call. Wikipedia opts to use different domains, eg. en.wikipedia.org and fr.wikipedia.org. Wikitravel uses the same domain but different subdirectories, eg. wikitravel.org/en and wikitravel.org/fr. I'm not aware of any major SEO implications (both styles show up fine in Google), but using subdomains is a bit easier to set up since you don't need to touch MediaWiki's default paths (/w, /wiki).