i’m currently preparing a huge web application and while i was looking other websites, i discovered that almost nobody use languages switch to change interface language. All companies purchased different domain name like:
Can you tell me why are they doing this ?
because it means that all domains share the same DB but only domain is used for SEO and to easily manage languages.
However it means they must update each domain separately when they change code.
One reason might be to prevent competitors from using those domain names in an attempt to confuse your visitors or steal your traffic.
It’s not really an SEO issue. If you have separate versions of your site in different languages, it doesn’t make a great deal of difference to the search engines whether each language has its own top-level country code, or is a sub-domain of the main domain, or any other scheme you choose. The top-level country codes are useful for attracting visitors from those countries (Google will favour .de domains for visitors from Germany, for example) - but even that’s not a very significant factor.