Multilingual website in Belgium?

[WeAreDigital_BE]

Hi Mozzers,

I have a question about a multilingual website for a client for us in Belgium. As you guys know in Belgium we speak French and Dutch.

The situation:
At the moment we have client.be for the Dutch version of the website and client.be/fr for the French version. All tagged with href lang tags and webmaster tools.

The client wants to build a new website. There are three possibilities:

1. We keep using subfolders (same configuration as the current situation). In my head this would be my first choice.

2. We just let them build two separate domains. 
client-keywordindutch.be & client-keywordinfrench.be

3. We use subdomains.

As the development company is not sure that it is technically possible to use subdomains, I need to know which option is the next best one and which option you would give priority and why? Should we just push through with the subfolder?

Thank you for your thoughts!
Sander

[jorisbrabants]

We do our best

[WeAreDigital_BE]

Thank you for your reply Joris! Good to see some Belgians participating on Moz :).

[jorisbrabants]

Those Belgians with their languages... says another Belgian.

I would go for subfolders as well, and keep the original domain name as it already has built some credibility in search engines.

[WeAreDigital_BE]

Thanks again Patrick! This confirms my assumption.

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

For me, if you're trying to target specific languages with your new site, I would use subdirectories. If it's an issue to do subdomains, you're better off building directories and targeting those specifically.

Hope this helps! Good luck!