How to structure URLs for language localized marketing and admin pages

Question

So I have let's say 20 languages the marketing pages of the website are localized into. I am thinking of doing this...

mywebsite.com/en/page-1
mywebsite.com/en/page-2
mywebsite.com/zh/page-1
mywebsite.com/zh/page-2
...

Actually, instead of putting the latin script in there, I would really do this:

mywebsite.com/english/page-1
mywebsite.com/english/page-2
mywebsite.com/中文/页一
mywebsite.com/中文/...

The reason for that is it gives an SEO benefit I would think, for the native language pages.

But now we move onto the admin panel. The admin panel might also have these 20 languages, but should it be structured the same way? Or should it instead be like this:

mywebsite.com/admin/users/1/edit?lang=zh
mywebsite.com/admin/users/1/edit?lang=en
....

Or better yet, just store the language in localStorage and clean up the URL completely.

The reason we do it this way is because these pages are all hidden anyways from search engines, so there's no SEO benefit to be had. Is this the correct way to handle both situations? Or what is best?

Answer 1

There is no feasible SEO benefit (unless anyone can prove it?)

There is a pain for sharing non Latin links as the link will end up containing %20%32%36 for non valid URL characters and therefore can not be read by human.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1547899/which-characters-make-a-url-invalid

My native language is Russian, I study Japanese, my keyboard does not have Japanese characters, how do I alter link to see japan page?

ISO notation is great in every way, everyone use it and there is really no reason for you not to follow it:

• http://apple.com/ru
• https://www.microsoft.com/ru-ru
• https://ru.stackoverflow.com/
• https://ru.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Языковая_локализация

I have never ever seen someone to make links localized: https://site.com/русский/latest-article Looks very odd to me

storing locale in localStorage is also not good as you can not send a link to a localized page:

• I send localized link to my foreign colleague on his language
• if particular page does not contain say French translation, it is clear how to get alternatives for other languages, and they are linkable. You will have a problem otherwise.

For most of webserves it is no longer a problem to have ../en-us/... instead of ?locale=en-us They can even transform one into another in background, so there is no need to choose less beautiful option to pass locale as query string (?locale=en)