Bad ass MULTIlanguage wordpress website - how to do it? [confused]

[ItsHere]

Ok, I want to set up on my wordpress website two language versions.

I have NO idea what should I do:

- create english section after www.mydomain.com/en/ and chinese section www.mydomain.com/hk/ ?

- create two subdomains, each for one language version - example: www.hk.mydomain.com and www.en.mydomain.com

All I want to make sure is SEO friendly - I will rank in google in english and in chinese language. Also I want to have available button in the corner of the website so in any time user is able to switch over the language version.

But, yeah...:

1. How my website will be indexed by Google and others?
2. Is it confusing for spiders to crawl my website?
3. How get it to the work and done it correctly?

I am really confused about impact on SEO with this kind of stuff..

 

[ba_laz]

I have just finished my other site and had the same problem.What i heard is domain.com/en is better for seo than en.domain.com.There is a plugin called wpmu,but its paid,and i hear it isnt great for seo,so what i did is cloned the ready english site and installed an other one at domain.com/other.You can just link to the other language with a flag widget.

 

[royalmice]

Why dont you just use a translator plugin on your site. "Global translator is a nice free one.

 

[ba_laz]

translator plugins make funny translations

 

[TZ2011]

Because automatic translators are not giving professional results, they translate text too literally, some words not recognized, grammaticaly not intuitive... If site is just a web 2.0 property made for fun or some backlinking strategy ok, will do the job, but if quality is your main trip forget the plugins and translators and make another copy of blog in folder /en and hire/rent/do it yourself real human translation.

 

[ItsHere]

I have just finished my other site and had the same problem.What i heard is domain.com/en is better for seo than en.domain.com.There is a plugin called wpmu,but its paid,and i hear it isnt great for seo,so what i did is cloned the ready english site and installed an other one at domain.com/other.You can just link to the other language with a flag widget.

Thanks! I will keep that in mind!

Why dont you just use a translator plugin on your site. "Global translator is a nice free one.

This will be the last option I would like to go for. The reason is translators work really poor, especially translating alphabet to chinese/japanese symbols. I tried a few times to translate some random articles/sites in and to chinese and believe me - I had lot of fun, trying to guess what the sentences are about
The website will be kinda professional - I don't want to get rid of visitors (especially Chinese) just because I was lazy enough to put translator.

 

[TZ2011]

http://www.wpmayor.com/plugin-reviews/best-wordpress-multilanguage-plugins/

here is nice comparison, will try to find wpml plugin, all my sites could use english and spanish.


here is the plugin wpml

http://oron.com/q1sfnf1bm5na

http://www.warez-bb.org/viewtopic.php?t=14023880&highlight=

if you go to

warez-bb.org

you will find 8 more plugins related to wpml, but specific functions like media translation, sticky links etc,l I think its worth it to spend some time in checking all options.

 

[ItsHere]

Thank you TZ2011! I will look for right solution. Still dealing with it...

Topic is still open so if anybody has some ideas, you are welcome to share it