Multilingual web site based on different web pages extensions?

[eluser]DimCI[/eluser]
The subject is clear imho.

been trying to implement such m/ling.site draft. E.g. english pages are '.htm', russian - '.shtml', ukrainean - '.html', etc... (if needed). Each page has a small menu to switch current lang.

Does anybody have any experience in this direction? If yes, tell me, please, your considerations and flashbacks about this idea having in mind seo impact, performance, and other important issues.

Waste of time or not?

Thank you

[eluser]xwero[/eluser]
i like the out of the box idea but i think the url should contain the language that is not the default language. If the site has no default language the landing page should be a language selection splash page, for example the Belgian Apple site

I wouldn't care too much about CEO because the page you are displaying in other languages has different content in the eyes of the search engines. The page in English can have a low pageranking but the page in russian a high one depending on how many backlinks the page has.

The performance is a big question because there are multiple ways of doing this.

The biggest problem i can think of is you run out of valid extensions. Maybe you could use the international abbreviations of the languages as extension from the start, .ru/.en, but this could be confusing as some countries toplevel is abbreviated the same as a language which results in an url like site.ru/controller/method.ru.

[eluser]DimCI[/eluser]
Thank you

[quote author="xwero" date="1245424431"]i like the out of the box idea but i think the url should contain the language that is not the default language. If the site has no default language the landing page should be a language selection splash page, for example the Belgian Apple site
[/quote]

I guess to use both defaults - language and url_suffix.

the logic is: if the url requested contains any of the used url_suffix-es (=w/page/file extension), we use it.. if not (a user entered e.g. an URL like 'www.website.com/controller/function/') but the cookie contains both language and url_suffix values, we use these then... and if not (the very first visit e.g. 'www.website.com/')- we use defaults. no need to have language in the url in this case imho.

[quote author="xwero" date="1245424431"]
I wouldn't care too much about CEO because the page you are displaying in other languages has different content in the eyes of the search engines. The page in English can have a low pageranking but the page in russian a high one depending on how many backlinks the page has.
[/quote]

i mean cookies usage in language determination first of all. Have no much knowledge in this. the idea is to implement each-page-language-switcher (small menu) in js to prevent different lang. pages crawling in one session. wanna to submit english web site like 'www.site.com/index.shtml' and russian like 'www.site.com/index.html', for example- so a crawler follows .shtml-s or .html-s depending on the submitted (start) page and does not even "see" the lang menu.
[/quote]
[quote author="xwero" date="1245424431"]
The performance is a big question because there are multiple ways of doing this.

The biggest problem i can think of is you run out of valid extensions. Maybe you could use the international abbreviations of the languages as extension from the start, .ru/.en, but this could be confusing as some countries toplevel is abbreviated the same as a language which results in an url like site.ru/controller/method.ru.[/quote]

i did not think about such extensions. No need more than 2-4 languages in my case