This article relates to Joomfish 1.8 and Joomla 1.0 and is not relevant to Joomfish 2.0 on Joomla 1.5. In Joomfish 2.0 this is taken care by the JFRouter Plugin.

The topic of search engines related to multilingual sites always appears related to domain names and other similar points. Let us get one thing clear first.

It is not the job of the Joom!Fish to manipulate or optimize your URL - for this you need an SEO extension such as openSEF, advancedSEF and so on. If those extensions are not compatible with the Joom!Fish or not working soothly together with the Joom!Fish DO NOT ASK US - ASK THE DEVELOPER of those extensions.

Anyhow - here are some ideas, concepts and hints related to the topic.

Multiple languages within one domain

The trick used here is that the SEF extension overwrites the $lang varaible for the fish and with that causes "theoretically" the Joom!Fish systembot to swtich the language at any call. This works and due to the caching of queries the performance isn't that bad. The technique also supports lot's of nice features of Google or other search engines.

The other possibility is to use different domain names. In this case the SEF extension will map the different domains to the same logic and internally the Joom!Fish will just get the correct information of which language to present.