Site structure for multi-lingual hotel website (subfolder names)

[underground]

Hi there superMozers!

I´ve read a quite a few questions about multi-lingual sites but none answered my doubt / idea, so here it is:

I´m re-designing an old website for a hotel in 4 different languages which are all** hosted on the same .com domain** as follows: example.com/english/ for english example.com/espanol/ for **spanish ** example.com/francais/ for french example.com/portugues/ for portuguese While doing keyword search, I have noticed that many travel agencies separate geographical areas by folders, therefor an **agency pomoting beach hotels in South America **will have a structure as follows:

travelagency.com/argentina-beach-hotels/

travelagency.com/peru-beach-hotels/

and they list hotels in each folder, therefor benefiting from those keywords to rank ahead of many independent hotels sites from those areas.

What **I would like to **do -rather than just naming those folders with the traditional /en/ for english or /fr/ for french etc- is take advantage of this extra language subfolder to_´include´_ important keywords in the name of the subfolders in the following way (supposing the we have a beach hotel in Argentina):

example.com/argentina-beach-hotel/ for english

example.com/hotel-playa-argentina/ for **spanish  **

example.com/hotel-plage-argentine/ for french

example.com/hotel-praia-argentina/ for portuguese

Note that the same keywords are used in the name of the folder, but translated into the language the subfolders are.

In order to make things clear for the search engines I would specify the language in the html  for each page.

My doubt is whether google or other search engines may consider this as ´stuffing´ although most travel agencies do it in their site structure.

Any Mozers have experience with this, any idea on how search engines may react, or if they could penalise the site?

Thanks in advance!

[underground]

Thanks for the article Keri, very refreshing and interesting regarding GA, much appreciated!

[KeriMorgret]

Don't forget to think about how your boss might react when asked for how many visits all of your pages in French got for the past 60 days. With the /francais/ in the URL, it's a snap. Other structures it might be a little more challenging. It's something to at least think about ahead of time.

Lunametrics has a great article on designing a Google Analytics friendly site at http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2010/09/22/designing-google-analytics-friendly-site/.

[underground]

Thanks a lot Ryan, I appreciate the fast and detailed answer! Will go ahead with your recommendations!

[RyanKent]

My doubt is whether google or other search engines may consider this as ´stuffing´

Your approach is definitely not considered key word stuffing. Search engines will be absolutely fine with it and they would not penalize your site.

When creating a new physical folder structure, try to plan your server out as if it will last 20 years. The ideal folder structure wont change because you switched from html to xhtml, nor because Joe left your company, nor because your company decided to support another language. Your structure requires careful planning and thought.

Also remember your physical folder structure does not need to match your virtual folder structure. Your server can show a path such as /en/hotels but you can create a route to offer those files by navigating to /argentina-beach-hotels.

Your are offering your users a clear, readable folder structure. There is nothing black hat nor bad about that in any way.