Website Translation Best Practices: Subdomain, Subfolder, ccTLD, or Querystring?
Offering your website in multiple languages is one of the most effective ways to reach new audiences, improve engagement, and strengthen brand trust. Yet many businesses still misunderstand what it truly means to translate a site. They might offer partial translations, changing the visible text while leaving the HTML language declaration set to English—or worse, they dynamically swap languages using cookies or JavaScript without changing the URL at all.
While these shortcuts may seem harmless, they pose significant problems for both users and search engines. Search engines can’t reliably index or rank pages that don’t have clear language signals, and users often get lost when URLs, navigation, or metadata don’t match the language they expect. A proper multilingual implementation does more than change text—it provides each language with its own structure, URL, and identity within your site.
Table of Contents
Why Proper Language Structure Matters
When Google crawls your site, it pays attention to several signals to understand what language a page is in and who it’s meant for. These include the lang attribute in the HTML, the text on the page, the presence of hreflang tags linking language versions, and the structure of your URLs. If your HTML still says lang="en" on a Spanish page, or if all languages share the same URL, Google can’t confidently associate that page with Spanish-language searchers.
This isn’t just a technicality; it directly affects visibility and user experience. When appropriately structured, translated URLs serve multiple critical functions:
- They improve search discoverability: Each language version becomes eligible to appear in localized search results.
- They clarify language intent to users: Visitors can instantly recognize whether they’re viewing content meant for them, especially when URLs and metadata match the language.
- They enable accurate analytics: Unique URLs allow you to measure engagement, conversion, and organic performance for each language version individually.
- They support better link equity: Links from regional partners, influencers, or directories can point directly to the appropriate localized version, thereby strengthening the visibility of the right audience.
Without these elements, multilingual websites often become invisible in local search and confusing to global users.
The Core Approaches to Multilingual URL Structures
There’s no single correct way to structure translated content. The best choice depends on your infrastructure, target markets, and SEO goals. Let’s explore the four most common approaches and weigh their advantages and trade-offs.
Translated Subdomains
Using subdomains for each language gives you a clear separation between language environments. In this setup, every translation lives on its own virtual site, often sharing the same CMS but operating as a unique entity in Google’s eyes. This is how we implemented GTranslate on our site.
Advantages
Subdomains allow for flexible configuration. You can host each subdomain on a local server or CDN edge node closer to your audience, which improves performance. Each language can also have its own Google Search Console property, allowing you to track impressions, clicks, and indexing issues independently.
This approach works exceptionally well for publishers, SaaS platforms, or companies like Martech Zone that want to analyze cross-language performance page by page. By keeping the URL slugs consistent across subdomains (e.g., https://fr.martech.zone/language-subdomain-subfolder/ ), it’s easy to compare metrics in analytics tools without sacrificing language clarity.
Challenges
The main drawback is that each subdomain is treated as a separate property. Authority and link equity don’t automatically transfer between them. You also need to configure DNS, SSL, and Search Console verification for each subdomain individually. For smaller teams, this adds maintenance overhead.
However, if you’re targeting different regions with separate marketing efforts or advertising campaigns, subdomains provide flexibility and long-term scalability.
Translated Subdirectories
Subdirectories are the most popular and search-friendly structure for multilingual websites. In this model, all languages live under the same root domain, but each has its own dedicated directory.
Advantages
This approach consolidates your domain authority. All inbound links contribute to the same domain strength, which benefits every language version. It’s also easier to maintain within a single CMS, and you only need one property in Google Search Console.
From a user perspective, subdirectories offer a familiar pattern that clearly communicates structure. Visitors instantly understand that /es/ means Spanish and /fr/ means French. You can also easily scale to new languages by adding more directories.
Challenges
The downside is that you lose some flexibility in hosting and regional configuration. For example, you can’t easily serve different countries from local servers or CDNs unless you use complex routing. Internal linking must also be managed carefully to ensure that users stay within their language version, rather than jumping between directories.
Subdirectories are best suited for organizations that want a unified SEO strategy across all markets but don’t need physical or technical separation between regions.
Country-Code Top-Level Domains
If your business operates independently in multiple countries, country-code top-level domains (ccTLDs) are the strongest possible signal to both users and search engines that your content is meant for that market.
Advantages
A ccTLD like .fr or .de instantly communicates local intent. Search engines treat each domain as specific to its region, giving you an advantage in country-targeted searches. Local users are also more likely to trust a familiar domain extension.
This structure also allows full autonomy for each market: unique content strategies, currencies, payment methods, or privacy policies can be implemented without affecting other sites.
Challenges
The trade-off is operational complexity. Each ccTLD must be managed, hosted, and optimized independently, requiring more resources and unique link-building strategies. You essentially manage multiple websites, rather than just one.
Unless you have dedicated teams or a strong market presence in each region, ccTLDs can be expensive and difficult to sustain. But for large enterprises or e-commerce platforms with regional pricing and localized operations, it’s often the best long-term investment.
Translation URL Parameters
Using query parameters for languages (?lang=fr or ?locale=es) is a shortcut that some developers adopt to save time. However, it’s not a best practice for multilingual SEO. In a well-known Google Webmaster Tools video, Maile Ohye emphasized that translated content should not be stored in a URL parameter because parameters don’t communicate intent as clearly as subdomains or directories.
Googlebot may crawl such URLs inefficiently, treating them as duplicates of the same page.
Advantages
URL parameters are easy to implement and don’t require structural changes to the site. For internal testing or private localization systems, they can work temporarily.
Challenges
They confuse both users and search engines. They’re hard to share or link to because language preferences may reset, and they don’t provide separate crawl paths for each language. Over time, this can lead to incomplete indexing, duplicated content, and suboptimal performance in localized search results.
Parameters are useful for filtering or sorting content—but not for defining language.
Page-Level Signals and Best Practices
Regardless of which URL structure you choose, search engines rely on consistent page-level signals to understand your multilingual intent. Three key technical elements are essential:
- Hreflang Tags: These annotations connect all language versions of a page. For example, the English, French, and Spanish pages for the duplicate content should all link to one another with hreflang attributes that specify the language (and optionally, the region). This prevents duplicate content issues and ensures that Google serves the correct version to the right audience.
<link rel="alternate" href="https://example.com/" hreflang="en">
<link rel="alternate" href="https://example.com/es/" hreflang="es">
<link rel="alternate" href="https://example.com/fr/" hreflang="fr">- HTML lang Attribute: The HTML tag at the top of each page should declare the primary language of that content (
<html lang="fr">). This simple signal is often overlooked but has a real impact on accessibility and SEO. - Canonical Tags: Each language version should include a canonical tag pointing to itself, not to other languages. Canonicals tell Google which page to treat as authoritative, ensuring that one translation doesn’t accidentally override another.
Combined, these signals help Google understand the relationship between your translated pages and crawl them efficiently.
Measuring Performance Across Languages
Proper URL design isn’t just good for SEO—it also simplifies analytics. With clear, consistent structures, you can track performance across languages with precision.
Many companies, including Martech Zone, opt to maintain identical URL slugs across translations (for example, /what-is-seo/in all languages). This makes it easier to measure engagement and rankings by page intent. Reports can show exactly how a single topic performs globally without requiring manual reconciliation of translated slugs.
The alternative—translating slugs into the target language (e.g., /que-es-seo/)—improves local relevance and may increase click-through rates in search results, but complicates cross-language comparisons. The choice depends on whether you prioritize analytical consistency or cultural authenticity.
Either way, the most important point is that each version has its own URL. That separation is what allows analytics, Search Console, and advertising systems to attribute visits correctly and display language-specific insights.
Common Pitfalls to Avoid
Even experienced marketers make mistakes when implementing multilingual sites. The most frequent issues include:
- Mismatched or missing lang attributes: Always declare the language of each page explicitly.
- Incorrect hreflang configurations: Ensure every version points to every other version, including itself, to form a complete loop.
- Serving different languages on the same URL: This confuses crawlers and can result in only one version being indexed.
- Mixing regions and languages inconsistently: Use standardized codes like es-MX (Spanish for Mexico) or fr-CA (French for Canada) when targeting specific regions.
- Using automated translations without review: Machine translations can harm credibility, user trust, and even violate Google’s content quality guidelines if not edited for accuracy.
Attention to these details ensures that your translated content is both discoverable and trustworthy.
The Strategic Payoff of Doing It Right
A multilingual website is not just a translation project—it’s a strategic investment in global growth. When implemented correctly, it transforms your site into a network of regionally relevant, culturally resonant landing pages that search engines can clearly understand and users can confidently navigate.
Each properly localized URL becomes its own search opportunity. Instead of competing against yourself in multiple languages, you’re now capturing new audiences under one cohesive brand. Over time, this creates compounding benefits: increased international traffic, improved conversion rates, and deeper insights into user behavior across markets.
Brands that treat translation as a technical exercise miss the larger picture. But those that combine linguistic authenticity with structural precision gain a long-term SEO advantage and global credibility.
Takeaway
A well-translated website speaks more than one language—but it also organizes those languages intelligently. Whether you use subdomains, subdirectories, or ccTLDs, your goal should be the same: to make each version distinct, discoverable, and properly signaled to search engines.
Ensure every translated page includes the correct lang attribute, hreflang relationships, and canonical tags. Avoid dynamic or parameter-based language switching, and consider your analytics needs when deciding whether to translate slugs.
Multilingual SEO is both an art and a science: the art of speaking authentically to new audiences, and the science of structuring URLs so search engines can understand and reward that effort. When you balance both, your brand gains a truly global voice—one that search engines recognize and users trust.
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