There are a lot of topics about multilanguage sites and we're familiar with most techniques. What i missed in all those is an option from subject that we often get from our clients. I.e. mostly each language is put in it's own "folder":

- en (served from: www.mydomain.com and www.mydomain.com/en)

- - english page 1 (served from: www.mydomain.com/en/page1)
- - english page 2 (served from: www.mydomain.com/en/page2)

- de (served from: www.mydomain.com/de)
- - deutch page 1 (served from: www.mydomain.com/de/page1)
- - deutch page 2 (served from: www.mydomain.com/de/page2)

But what our clients often want is to server main language from the url root (www.mydomain.com/page1 gives english page 1 from example above) and other langugages from subfolders (www.mydomain.com/de/page1 just like above)

Now, there are 2 options here, none without problems:

1) put english content in root - this makes macros more complex as not all language pages are in the same level
2) put every langugage in it's onf folder and play with urlrewrite rules - much work needed to avoid duplicate content as we don't want any links to "/en" folder nor any content server from that url. Basically, we ned to set umbracoHideTopLevelNodeFromPath = true to avoid linking to "/en/" then update some navigation macros to add langugage subfolders to links, then possibly some more urlrewrites to fight duplicate content

At the end, my question is ... is there simplier way? Even more important, is it worth it? Is it any good (or even bad) for SEO to put main langugage in root?