Should I Use Two Domains for Multi Language Sites?

[atstickel12]

I have an immigration attorney that wants a website in English and another in Spanish. We're going to have some of the website content from the English site translated via a translator to make it true, conversation spanish (automatic translators are good, but not perfect, and we want perfect). So my question is do you think we should use two different domains (englishsite.com, spanishsite.com), a subdomain (spanishsite.englishsite.com) or maybe just a separate section of the regular site (englishsite.com/spanishcontent)? My thought would be either a subdomain or a separate section so that we're not splitting PR.

[Bryan_Loconto]

If you want to rank for your site in both languages and have them crawled you need to create separate pages for each language. Read here: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/multilingual-seo/19903/

If you use an auto detect function your content will not cater good to your audience or Google.

[cbielich]

Well not everyone might have their language set on their browser either. Just add links on the top so they can pick a language. Along with auto responsive and auto detect language for the outsiders

[atstickel12]

That's a good idea, and I considered that, but the problem is that my client is in Ohio and most of the spanish speaking people that are contacting him are also in Ohio, so it's a bit difficult to narrow it down that way. Maybe we could make it so that we can detect their browser language and then respond accordingly?

[cbielich]

I personally would do some auto responsive design to detect the location of the user and display the language of choice. Here is some good practices according to Google

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=182192#1