Multilingual Sites Where the hreflang Is Actually Correct

Subdirectories for almost everyone. One domain accumulates authority across all languages, operations stay simple, and there is one certificate and one deployment. Subdomains split authority for little benefit unless the markets are genuinely separate businesses. Country domains make sense when you need local trust signals or have legally distinct entities per market, and you should expect to build authority for each one independently, which is a far larger commitment than it looks.

Yes for commercial pages, where the slug carries a term the market actually types. Once you do, the URL stops identifying which pages belong to the same cluster, so you need an explicit key linking the versions. That is a small implementation detail which is very difficult to retrofit onto a large site, so decide it before publishing rather than after.

No, and pretending otherwise is how translation budgets get wasted. Declare alternates only for pages that genuinely exist in that language, because declaring a version that 404s or redirects breaks the cluster. It is entirely reasonable to run a full site in two languages and only the commercial pages in six others. What is not reasonable is publishing thin machine translations to fill in a matrix.

At whichever version best serves a visitor whose language matches none of your alternates. Many sites point it at their home market by reflex, which hands a reader with no other option a page they cannot read. On this site it points at English, because English is the version most likely to be understood by someone outside our declared languages and it carries most of our measured traffic.

Usually yes, and the difficulty depends entirely on how the current site is built. A site already using a proper internationalisation framework is straightforward. A site where the language was hardcoded throughout means extracting every string first, which is frequently the larger part of the work. We assess this before quoting, because the two cases differ by a wide margin and you should know which one you are.

We build the system, and we can produce native content for the languages we cover or integrate with translators you already work with. What we will not do is wire up machine translation and call the site multilingual. It ranks poorly, it reads as machine output to the people you are trying to sell to, and it wastes the technical work underneath it.