Is it worth taking out a foreign language version of the blog on a subdomain?

Question

Search Engine Optimization

Good afternoon.
There is a blog with articles in Russian. I want to add an English version, where I will publish translations of my own articles. Although the content of the English and Russian versions may differ slightly.
I see two split options:
1. Add language to url.
english: site.com/blog, /blog/:postId
russian: site.com/ru/blog, /ru/blog/:postId
2. Add a language to the subdomain:
english: site.com/blog
russian: ru.site. com/blog
And I don't know how it would be better. The first option is good because all the content is on one subdomain and it is better for search engines. But everything is heaped together and I don't really like it. The second option gives a clear separation, but the link mass is also divided.
Please advise which option is best? Preferably with reason.

Answer 1

From experience, it doesn't matter. I have been making multilingual websites for six years. Although Google has stressed several times that it will boost national content hosted on the national domain. That is, if a Russian - sit in RU, if an Englishman - in co.uk, an American - in COM. In practice, Google aligns itself with the market and does not punish anyone, because it is not a trivial task for an average webmaster to split competently asymmetrically localized content into two domains under one CMS. If the content has external links and authority, it will have it. From the latest innovations - Google recommends putting hreflang meta tags in the site headers in order to finally get a reliable way to account for content by language and not fool around.

Answer 2

In which domain zone is the site in Russian?
The best options are:
1. Separate domain
2. Subdomain - eng.site.com
3. Folder - site.com/eng/
If there is a page in several languages, it is recommended to use the rel="alternate" hreflang="x" attribute.
More details can be found in Google help - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/18907...

Answer 3

The third option is to hang the language on the session or cookies.

Answer 4

Before making a decision, I strongly recommend to dig in the direction of SEO regarding this issue.
For, it is one page presented in different languages.

Answer 5

I believe that both options are equivalent in terms of SEO based on the documentation of popular search engines. According to the taste of the developer.
But you can return from site.com/blog in the language the browser wants using content negotiation . To do this, the server must monitor the request header Accept-Language and return content in this language, if the languages ​​from the header are not supported by the server or the header is missing, return the content in the default language. The site will become smarter and if my browser is set to Russian, then when I enter site.com/blog I will receive content in Russian, I will not need to specifically go to site.com/ru/blog for Russian content. The user will be pleased.