I have a Django site (version 1.5) supporting 3 language choices; basically it is a directory of "resources" (aka POIs) for the citizens of a large city. A few introductory pages contain text which has been translated by hand in every language. The other pages display data (resource profiles) from a database: these data are in part language-independent; besides UI messages, headings and field names, we translate dynamically the keywords used for the categorization of the resources: the set of keywords is quite large.
I would like to make the search engines aware that, at some extent, this site supports different languages, and to expose to them the keywords (categorization terms) in all languages. I see 2 options:
a) keep only 1 url for each page, and insert the relevant keywords for all languages in the keywords meta-tag; will this be effective or could it confuse the indexer ?
b) multiply by 3 the apparent number of pages, using language prefixes in internal urls; we could also use some meta-tags to tell the robots which pages are the reference (default language) and which are derived pages (translations); could this choice hurt some search engines? also, it seems that both django-localeurl and i18n_patterns take care only of processing the HTTP request: in order to avoid updating all the templates by hand, should we write some middleware to systematically prepend language code to internal urls in the HTTP response?
Any suggestion? Thanks in advance.
Better is to use variant B.
Read what Google says about it. It is also good to have filled lang tag and point to default page by canonical url.
Django manage creating URLs with language code as well as normal. I don't see a problem with it.