I have a very conservative approach to website development, reflected in simple HTML and traditional, pyramid-shaped hierarchies - starting with:

www.widgets.com/index.html

and digging deeper level by level through sub-directories, e.g.:

www.widgets.com/topic1/page1-topic1.html

Now, a bit more than a year ago, I decided to do a second language version of a very established website of mine. I opted against a subdomain in order to focus the website on one homepage and instead, I translated the entire thing and mirrored it in a folder like this:

www.widgets.com/language/index.html

The homepage in the original language is still accessible from every page through the breadcrumb navigation, but all other header-links from the new language version lead to the new-language-index page.

Here's my problem: The new-language homepage got indexed, but does not show in the relevant version of Google - instead, the old-language index shows, but does of course not rank very well, as there are plenty of websites of the relevant language who are older (but worse content-wise). The new-language homepage has still no pagerank, nor does it attract an awful lot of traffic. Please discuss or advise.