Multi-language site - one domain or multiple domains?

Question

Which one is the best way to contruct a multi-language site if you want the most effective SEO?

Use a single domain?

www.domain.com/en
www.domain.com/de
www.domain.com/dk

Or use multiple domains, one for each language?

www.domain.com
www.domain.de
www.domain.dk

Answer 1

If you have multi-lingual content you should follow Google's new multi-lingual guidelines. Basically, you use subdomains for the different translations:

To explain how it works, let’s look at some example URLs: http://www.example.com/ - contains the general homepage of a website, in Spanish http://es-es.example.com/ - is the version for users in Spain, in Spanish http://es-mx.example.com/ - is the version for users in Mexico, in Spanish http://en.example.com/ - is the generic English language version On all of these pages, we could use the following markup to specify language and optionally the region:

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="es" href="http://www.example.com/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="es-ES" href="http://es-es.example.com/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="es-MX" href="http://es-mx.example.com/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="http://en.example.com/" />

If you specify a regional subtag, we’ll assume that you want to target that region. Keep in mind that all of these annotations are to be used on a per-URL basis. You should take care to use the specific URL, not the homepage, for both of these link elements.