I want to make a multi-language site, but I'm not sure what the best way is to deal with the URL structure from a SEO point of view. Some examples:
Product
example.com/product/123/en/product-name
or
example.com/product/123/product-name/en
Or other?
Category
example.com/Category/en/furniture/chair/
or
example.com/Category/en/120/chair/
or
example.com/Category/en/chair/
Or other?
(Ignoring the SEO aspect, as it’s off-topic on Stack Overflow.)
Having the language tag as the first path segment is the most common convention. And it makes sense, especially if you translate the path (which you should!), because the path represents a hierarchy:
The top entry is the homepage:
example.org/en
example.org/de
From there, you select a product:
example.org/en/product/123/chair
example.org/de/produkt/123/stuhl
Or a category:
example.org/en/category/furniture
example.org/de/kategorie/möbel
If having the language tag somewhere in the middle or at the end of the path, it wouldn’t allow for browsable URLs (at least not in a sensible way, with translated paths).