How to correctly specify the language version in the URL?

Question

Domain name market

There are at least two options:

www.domain.com/en
www.domain.com/ru

or

www.en.domain.com
www.ru.domain.com

I met both options on the Internet.
Which one do you think is better to use? Or does it not matter at all?

Answer 1

Personally, I like the option when www.domain.com displays the English version of the site, and www.domain.ru - Russian. But both domains are not always available.
Then the option with www.domain.com/ru (or /en/) will do.
I don't particularly like the option with ru.domain.com. And certainly www.ru.domain.com will look very strange

Answer 2

The people above wrote the deepest nonsense. Consult with any, even a weak SEO, he will tell you a lot of interesting things about domains, subdomains and locales. In general, this greatly affects the output in search engines, since they take into account the user's locale.
As far as I remember, the preference options go like this:
1. domain.locale (the most expensive)
2. locale.domain.com (less expensive, but still the domains are different, there may be problems with this)
3 domain.com/locale ( least simple)
That is, the first is most preferable, the last is the least. But I could be wrong, I just heard a conversation about this, I myself was not actively interested.

Answer 3

In my opinion, the first method is preferable due to its obviousness. The second way is not so obvious to the user.

Answer 4

>Or it doesn't play any role at all
It doesn't play any role, it's just how it is convenient for you to implement it and do
it for many large sites, it occurs both in the first option and in the second.
You can also implement both, then most users will be satisfied

Answer 5

The first one is more convenient, from several aspects:
- more visual
- easier to maintain sessions
- easier to maintain "routing"
- more robot-friendly

Answer 6

IMHO the first way is better (if possible),
otherwise when using the 2nd option, it turns out that this is already a subdomain and the page weight may drop

Answer 7

the first option is purely visually pleasing looks

Answer 8

There is also automatic language detection, for example, like Google - although it has divisions into domain zones, the Russian-speaking user from .com still redirects to .ru. On the one hand, sometimes it can interfere, but on the other hand, the domain is always without prefixes and the user can think less.

Answer 9

www.domain.com/ * - for the main language audience
www.domain.com/lang/ * - for the additional language audience.
With subdomains, these are already completely different sites, they are very rarely used.
In general, many CMS give out this:
www.domain.com/index.html?lang=ru

Answer 10

For PS, the first option is better.
Well, it is better to keep the main language at the root, of course.

Answer 11

Thanks for answers.
I'll stop then at domain.com/en

Answer 12

The first one is better, but I personally don’t like it - it’s not normal to put links in templates, you have to do something like href="{{ lang }}path/on/site"

Answer 13

Why not show the site in English (or determine from the system/browser language).
Give the user the choice of changing the language, store it in the user's cookies / database and do not mock with /ru/ /en/

Answer 14

I personally encountered such a problem (but it is more from my own stupidity than from the choice of method):
There was a site. There were domains Company.ru and CorrectName of Company.com. An instruction was given to abolish the domain with .ru because it was not supposed to. As a result, I had to make the Russian version on the PNK.com domain, and redirect users with non-Russian roots (in browser headers) to en.PNK.com (the structure of the Russian and English versions differed, but not much, and the architecture of the engine would force me to cruelly copy-paste to store the site in different subfolders). In the end, everything was fine, until yandex, which visited the site without a header related to the locale, glued the domain to the English version. As a result, I had to communicate with technical support so that the domain was unglued.
Why am I? To the fact that following the first method, you need to be very careful about the automatic choice of language, otherwise there will be big SEO problems)

Answer 15

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/18219...