Best practice for multi-language site?
-
Recently our company is going to expand our site from just english to multi-language, including english, french, german, japanese, and chinese.
I deeply understand a solid and feasible plan is pretty important, so I want to ask you mozzers for help before we taking action!
Our site is a business site which sells eBook software, for the product pages, the ranks are taken by famous software download sites like cnet, softonic, etc. So the main source of our organic traffic is the guide post, long-tail keywords.
We are going to manually translate the product pages and guide post pages which targeting on important keywords into other languages. Not the entire english site.
So my primary question is: should I use the sub-domain or sub-category to build the non-english pages? "www.example.com/fr/" or "fr.example.com"?
The second question: As we are going to manually translate the entire pages into other languages, should I use the "rel=alternate hreflang=x" tags? Because Google's official guideline says if we only translate the navigations or just part of the content, we should use this tag.
And what's your tips for building a multi-language site? Please let me know them as much as possible
Thanks!
-
Yes that's a good point. So if you are just translating content but not targeting it to specific countries only, you can use href lang to specify the language, without specifying the country. E.g.
would specify French Canadian content but
would just state that it is for all French speakers.
In this case, you wouldn't need different top level domains to target each country, which is probably more than what you need!
Hope that helps.
-
There is a difference in targeting by country and targeting by language. What I am seeing here is that you are translating only. You won't be distinguishing Canadian traffic from France traffic right? Just have your content in French?
-
I'm not sure of the definitive answer to your question re. subfolders / subdirectories but have you considered using ccTLDs? As this is still the clearest way to tell Google what country you are targeting. Obviously there are logistical points to consider on this.
See what everyone else says but there are some great articles here:
http://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/international-seo-strategy-guide http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-where-to-host-and-how-to-target-whiteboard-friday http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-dropping-the-information-dust
Re. href lang, yes I think you should implement them if you are keeping the info all on the same domain but you don't have to do it on a page by page basis - you can make a sitemap. More info and free tool to generate them here:
http://www.themediaflow.com/2012/08/an-international-seo-implementation-tale-sitemaps-relalternate-hreflangx/
http://www.themediaflow.com/resources/tools/href-lang-tool/Hope that helps!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Setting up international site subdirectories in GSC as separate properties for better geotargeting?
My client has an international website with a subdirectory structure for each country and language version - eg. /en-US. At present, there is a single property set up for the domain in Google Search Console but there are currently various geotargeting issues I’m trying to correct with hreflang tags. My question is, is it still recommended practise and helpful to add each international subdirectory to Google Search Console as an individual property to help with correct language and region tagging? I know there used to be properly sets for this but haven’t found any up to date guidance on whether setting up all the different versions as their own properties might help with targeting. Many thanks in advance!
International SEO | | MMcCalden0 -
Multinational website - best practice
Hello, I am researching a lot on this subject and have read several articles here on Moz and elsewhere about the best practices for multinational websites. But I'm not yet convinced on what would be the best solution in my case. Today we have the following websites (examples):
International SEO | | WebGain
website.com which function as a global website.
website.dk which is for the danish market
website.no which is for the norwegian market Some of the content on these websites are the same (but different languages; english, danish and norwegian). We want to expand the business to more countries and work with ccTLDs. Both to countries which speaks languages that we don't have content for yet (an example could be Poland), but also more countries that speaks english, like Great Britain (with a .co.uk domain) and Australia (with a .com.au domain). We expect to expand in many countries (as many as it makes sense to do). I have read a lot about the alternative hreflang tag which would look like and that seems like a good solution, but I have a couple of questions that I hope you guys can answer: Should the alternate hreflang tags show every existing language versions including the one you're on or only show the alternative versions? Do we risk penalty by having identical or almost identical content for same language websites (could be UK and the global .com one) if we use the alternate hreflang tags? I'm aware that we should use the native spellings and sentences in each country. Would the sitemap solution be better in our case? We have the same link structure for all websites, but the sub-directories can differ due to their language (like /articles/ is /artikler/ in danish) - is that an issue? Will hreflang="en" function as global english? (so searching users that we don't have a local website for will see that).0 -
Shall I automatically redirect international visitors from www.domain.com to e.g. www.domain.com/es? What is best SEO practice?
We have chosen the one domain approach with our international site having different language versions in subdirectory of main domain:
International SEO | | lcourse
www.domain.com/es
www.domain.com/it
etc. What is SEO-wise best practice for implementing international index pages. I see following options: entering www.domain.com will display without redirection the index page in language of user (e.g based on IP or browser) in www.domain.com
Example: www.booking.com entering www.domain.com will always show English index page.
Additionally one may display a message in the header if IP from other country with link to other language version.
Example: www.apple.com entering www.domain.com will always redirect automatically to country specific subdirectory based on IP
Example: www.samsung.com Any thoughts/suggestions on what may be best solution from a SEO perspective? For a user I believe options 1) & 3) are preferable.0 -
Naming URL for Russian version of the site
Hi, Our site has two languages: English and Russian. My question is that should I use Cyrillic letters in the URL structure and file naming of the Russian version of the site, as Russian users are searching for information by using Russian words not English words? Thanks in advance, Sam
International SEO | | Awaraman0 -
Using Javascript to alter ONE or TWO keywords in International Site
Hi, What is the best way to target a language that has slight variations in it without actually targetting specific countries? Scenario: Ecommerce site that sells mobile phones in Spanish, initially created to target Spanish from Spain. We call a mobile phone a "movil" Now we want to target LatinAmerican users, which also use Spanish with variations, the most notable being mobile phone called "celular". We don't want to create specific sites via new ccTLDs, nor subdomains, no directories for each new country, and we want to avoid having two sites - one for spain, one for latinamerica- given that the only major difference is we say MOVIL in spain and CELULAR in LatinAmerica. What is Googles take if we simply decide to modify THAT specific keyword in each page where it is mentioned? Either by: a) Server based. IP Detect. that is, render the page with either one or the other term b) Javascript based. i.e. Have BOTH terms on all pages but using Javascript show/hide according to user preferences. c) Display the keywords with different font sizes/emphasis, depending on the visitor. Any ideas?
International SEO | | doctorSIM0 -
Multi-National Website Demarcation in Organic Search
We launched our business in the UK many years ago using a .com domain and have built up good link equity back to our www site. Last year, we launched the same business in the US and host the US site on a "us." sub domain. We have used Google Webmaster Tools to demarcate the two websites so that the www site is set to target the UK and the "us." sub domain is set to target the US. Our organic search results from Google UK for the UK business are fine but when our US customers Google brand terms the www UK site takes precedence in organic search. To complicate this further, the sitelinks within the search results include a mixture of pages from the www UK site and the "us." US site. Google clearly has some difficulty understanding that the two sites are for two different geographic audiences. We have a good relationship with Google and they have indicated (with appropriate disclaimers) that we might consider aligning the URL structures for both sites to reduce the precedence that the www site currently receives. The www home page will become an International portal and the UK and US URL structures will be aligned. We have two options: Change both sites to subdomains so that we have "uk.xxxxx.com" and "us.xxxxx.com" linked to an International portal at the www subdomain Use sub folders so that we have "www.xxxxx.com/uk/" and "www.xxxxx.com/us/" again linked from the www subdomain We're comfortable with use of 301 redirects and canonicals to change the structure in a search engine friendly way but cannot agree internally whether sub domains or sub folders is the way to go. Unfortunately we're to far down the line to seperate by tld. Anyone have a strong opinion on the best approach? Thanks, Jeremy
International SEO | | www.webuyanycar.com0 -
International SEO whats best 2 sites co.uk and com.au ?
We have the co.uk and com.au ccTLDS and currently operate out of the UK only but plans are in place for Australia. We can't get hold of the .org or .com so it has to be the ccTLD. I want to use the same site for both countries and either host 2 identical sites (same content) or 1 site with different domain names + meta tags for the 2 countries. Whats the best way to make this happen without screwing things up?
International SEO | | therealmarkhall0 -
Site Spider/ Crawler/ Scraper Software
Short of coding up your own web crawler - does anyone know/ have any experience with a good bit of software to run through all the pages on a single domain? (And potentially on linked domains 1 hop away...) This could be either server or desktop based. Useful capabilities would include: Scraping (x-path parameters) of clicks from homepage (site architecture) http headers Multi threading Use of proxies Robots.txt compliance option csv output Anything else you can think of... Perhaps an oppourtunity for an additional SEOmoz tool here since they do it already! Cheers! Note:
International SEO | | AlexThomas
I've had a look at: Nutch
http://nutch.apache.org/ Heritrix
https://webarchive.jira.com/wiki/display/Heritrix/Heritrix Scrapy
http://doc.scrapy.org/en/latest/intro/overview.html Mozenda (does scraping but doesn't appear extensible..) Any experience/ preferences with these or others?0