I have set up a multilingual website, whose default language is English and it is translated in many more languages. We have chosen for the subdirectory URL strategy, so that our URLs are like example.com/en
, example.com/fr
etc. Should the default language be omitted from those URLs? So instead of
example.com/en
example.com/fr
example.com/de
we could use
example.com
(default site language, EN in this case)
example.com/fr
example.com/de
Which is better in terms of SEO, UX, best practices?
p.s. I have read this and this but focus is given on whether translation of URLs is optimal and they do not really address my question. FYI, in my case, either the English wording is retained (example.com/en/about
, example.com/fr/about
) or in cases when this is not possible, the URL is transliterated.
I think representing the default language in the URL is the better choice.
Pros:
/
based on the visitor’s language preference.site:example.com/en/
; where site:example.com/
would find pages in all languages).Cons:
I can’t think of any reasons not to include the default language’s code in the URL.
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