I’ve been busy last couple of weeks working on a small scale site for a friend who has a villa on the Adriatic coast. The villa offers rooms and apartments, and the potential clients come from various countries in Europe. They wanted the site to contain content in three languages - English, Italian and Croatian. This posed somewhat of a challenge, as we were faced with a decision on how to implement multilingual content on a single site, and have the benefit of Google actually indexing it and showing the appropriate pages in search results.

Having addressed this issue before in previous projects, and having read a lot about others’ opinions on best practices, I’ve come to the conclusion that there isn’t a pure best practice in this case, but rather best logic approach. We decided to store content in different languages in subfolders on the site (rather than subdomains). The site is in Croatian by default (root), while English and Italian are in subfolders (/en and /it respectively).

Bottom line is, we have achieved positive results, as most pages are ranked for targeted queries for their appropriate language in the top 20, some even in the top 10, and all this without link building and other off-site SEO. I don’t expect the pages to keep ranking well for too long without additional off-site SEO work, but for now this is pretty good.

This is the second time a site I worked on produced satisfactory search engine results for multilingual content stored in subfolders, rather than on subdomains or separate domains altogether. I am more and more convinced that the choice of content structure should be viewed from the logical/development/usability point of view, rather than worrying too much about how Google is going to digest content in different languages on the same site. The key may be consistency - make it easy for the observer to understand the content structure, and stick to it without adding unnecessary layers of complication.

If content organization seems logical and easy to understand to a human looking at the content structure on a site, I am pretty sure a search engine algorithm will understand it just as well. Naturally, depending on the size and level of localization, a site can require very different approaches for housing multilingual content, as described in this document.

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