Multiple domain management
As you must have noticed, this site is also available in Portuguese and French. However, those language specific versions are accessed through different domains. What are the advantages of having a different domain for each language?
The answer is simple. In the same way that is highly desired to have friendly and localized urls, it's equally interesting that the website's domain is in the target audience language. That's because when keywords are found in the website's domain, they have a higher degree of importance not only to search engines but also to site visitors. It's not likely that a website whose domain name is www.heart-diseases.com becomes very popular between french speakers, even if the website has content in french. But, if the same website could be accessed through www.maladies-du-coeur.com, it potentially could be much more successful.
Obviously, this is not applicable if the domain is the company or organization name, for example, United Nations or Petrobras.
Another possibility is to provide more than one domain for the same language. This can be made to assure the visitor will be able to get access to the website even if he/she misspells the domain name. Using the www.heart-diseases.com example, the same website could be accessible also through www.heart-disease.com. However, to avoid that these domains compete in the search engines ranking, we need to permanently redirect all users to one domain. When we do a permanent redirect the browser or search engines get a 301 Move Permanently message, and do not index the first website.
In MultiLanguageWebSites.Com the redirects management is made automatically by our multilingual content management system, SMContent.
For more information about page redirects read the following articles:
URL Redirection - Wikipedia
How to redirect a web page - Steven Hargrove
