We are currently maintaining country folders likewww.example.net/de/www.example.net/fr/Now we are thinking about Swiss with 3 languages (it, de, fr). I think it's bad to change all the current directories. Is it okay to only add the region if necessary? For example:www.example.net/de/ = German speaking, not Swisswww.example.net/fr/www.example.net/it/www.example.net/de-CH/ = German speaking, Swiss onlywww.example.net/it-CH/www.example.net/fr-CH/So: Is it for SEO okay to mix the subfolder structure between /lang/ & /lang-country/?
Is it for SEO okay to mix the subfolder structure between /lang/ & /lang-country/?
url;local seo;internationalization;multilingual;geotargeting
This should be fine. It probably doesnt affect SEO. Consumers would have no reason to parse the URL path segment if they could just parse the rel-alternate+hreflang markup instead, which is typically easier and more reliable. Any way, even if the URL path segment is used by some consumers, both types are valid language tags after all.For what its worth, Mozilla does this for their Firefox add-on site, too:es: https://addons.mozilla.org/es/firefox/addon/noscript/de: https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/noscript/en-GB: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/noscript/en-US: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/noscript/(en and unknown values redirect to en-US)(de-DE/de-CH redirect to de)