SEO in foreign languages
-
Hi everyone,
I currently run a website called Barquitos www.barquitos.com
The site is an extension of a shop that is based here in Spain. Though because the town is particularly touristy we built the website to offer English and Spanish as language options on the site. English on Barquitos.com and Spanish through a sub domain es.barquitos.com.
In an ideal world I want to rank the English version for English phrases on Google.co.uk, and the Spanish sub domain on es.barquitos.com. However, my Spanish is only at a reasonable standard, probably not good enough to look at writing quality content in Spanish.
Is building up the Page Authority and Domain authority for the English main domain enough to rank the Spanish sub domain or do we need a focussed approach for both languages?
Any tips or advice for helping to rank sub domains in foreign languages would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks everyone
Stu
-
Hi Stu, as the root domain and sub-domain are targeting different geo-locations, moreoever Google treats the sub-domains a little more like a stand alone website, it is highly recommended to earn links for both of them individually, by all possible means from their respective geographies, I mean from the web properties operating or targeting audience in those geo-locations. For example, it would be odd for me to earn links for a Japanese website, targeting Japanese audience from web properties operating or targeting USA audience. Though this is not uncommon, it will not serve the purpose. Over and above this, fetching quality back links from any where is always recommended especially if those links are from authority web properties with high DA, PA and other SEO goodies like good Google PageRank etc..
I would conclude by addressing your question that fetching links to the root domain will not help much to make the sub-domain rank high in search results for many obvious reasons. Just like we do deep link promotions for promoting pages other than the home page so that they can rank high for their respective target terms, we should be promoting the sub-domains also as if they were standalone websites so as to get maximum benefit from an off-page promotional campaign.
Hope it helps my friend.
Best,
Devanur Rafi
-
Thanks Devanur, appreciate the response.
Yeah I have read that before, and took everything into account when setting up the site. My only issue now is really pushing the SEO ongoing. Would you say pushing the link building on the main domain (English site and English SEO) would in turn rank the sub domain as well?
Many thanks
Stu
-
Hi Stu, here is a quick link from Google that can guide you in this regard:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en
Once you go through it, please feel free to get back with further queries.
Best,
Devanur Rafi
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
-
An International SEO Conundrum
Hello all, I'm looking for opinions on this. Imagine there is a website example.com in English and the company 'Example' wanted to translate some of the pages (not not all) in to Russian. So they set up example.com/ru and translate the key pages into Russian. But half of the pages on.com/ru are left in English and there are no plans to translate them. How would you handle the pages in Engish on .com/ru? My thoughts are that they should: Canonicalise to the same versions on .com, and... Remove RU hreflang tags from the pages on .com/ru which are in English Otherwise, users searching in English with Russian browser settings could land on a page in English but then navigate to a translated page in Russian (+the menu navigation items will be in Russian) = bad UX. Not to mention they would be telling Google a page is in Russain but Google would be crawling English. So IMO, the best option is to use canonicals for this so that the .com version of the page is indexed. Then when a user lands after searching in English they will always be served English pages within that session. If English speakers/searchers land on the .com/ru page that would lead to a website half in one lang and half in another. I'm aware that Google recommends not using rel="canonical" across country or language versions of your site, but I believe they are making that recommendation based on an assumption that all pages are going to be translated to another language. In this case, there is no intention to do that, ever. Thanks for your thoughts and opinions. Cheers, Gill.
International SEO | | Cannetastic0 -
International SEO Mobile directory
I was wondering, What if I went with international sub-directory route (not ccTLD), for example: sitename.com/fr (fr being france)...But the question is, what's the best practice for MOBILE?sitename.com/mobile/frORsitename.com/fr/mobileORm.sitename.com/fr Again, ccTLD is not an option (currently, sites are in ccTLD but we are now transitioning to sub folders)Now, the next question is WHY is it best practices for it to be sitename.com/mobile/fr or sitename.com/fr/mobile or m.sitename.com/fr ? Please cite source. Thanks!
International SEO | | ggpaul5620 -
Search visibility increase with international SEO
Hi Moz Community, I am wondering if there is any tool and/or any sort of standard increase in search visibility I can assume that we will have with our website if we expand to start targeting Spanish with our site. At the moment we receive about 6000-7000 visits a day with 75% of that coming from the US and UK. I am wondering is there any way to make a rough assumption on visibility that will increase by launching a new Spanish speaking website. It would be a subdirectory, not a subdomain or gTLD. I am struggling to find a concrete answer on this and i'd like to make a semi-accurate forecast of the traffic we can expect based on the increase in search visibility that our Spanish language site will provide us. Thanks
International SEO | | Brian_Dowd0 -
Shabaka domain - Impact on SEO
Hi All, I heard about shabaka domain names recently and am not sure if getting a shabaka top-level domain with arabic content help from a SEO stand-point? Currently my Arabic website is on this domain: http://www.tcf-me.ae/ Do you think it is a good idea to get a shabaka domain to target the GCC countries on our Arabic website? Or does it not matter? Thoughts? Thanks in advance for your help.
International SEO | | LaythDajani1 -
International SEO - Setting up reporting
What would you consider to be a best practice for setting up international keyword tracking? Both in MOZ and in Google Analytics? Would you set them up by language? IE Spanish, French, German... Or by country? Mexico, Spain, US Spanish, French Canadian, French... ect... *Our website is set up with our countries in subdomains. We currently are in about 10 different countries and plan on expanding globally. Any advice helps! Much thanks!
International SEO | | ScentsySEO0 -
International SEO | URL Structure
I'm looking for advice/point of view for setting up international domains. I.e. sub-domains, ccTLD, etc. At the 10,000 ft. view - the client (international retail company) is trying to decide which type of URL structure to use in their new platform: Option 1: Root Domain ccTLD - www.brand.ca, www.brand.fr, etc. Option 2: Subdomains - fr.brand.com, ca.brand.com, au.brand.com Option 3: Subfolders - ]www.brand.com/ca/, ]www.brand.com/au/ Consider these scenarios/questions and use to help decide which URL structure makes sense: 1) I'm an Aussie in Australia and I do a Google search on Hank Myer Aron, which is a huge seller in the U.S. and also included at the Australia locale site. If we go with subfolders, am I likely to see the U.S. Aron page higher in my search results than the Australia Aron page? Or is the U.S. site not a factor in a search done outside the U.S.? If we use subfolders AND geo-detection, does this bump the ranking of the locale page? Do sites using ccTLDs always get ranked above those that don't? For example, if an Australian dealer selling Aron has URLs dealer.com.au/..., would their pages rank ahead of hankmyer.com/au/...? If we went the ccTLD route, would the Aron page at hankmyer.com.au take precedence over the U.S. page? (Again, assuming U.S. site is relevant in this scenario.) 2) I'm a Frenchman in France searching on Hank Myer Aron. If we use subfolders AND an alias URL that's translated to French (brand.com/fr/produits/sieges/sieges-aron), would we expect the page rank to be comparable to using the ccTLD and/or expect greater trust than just using subfolders without translated URLs? Do translated URLs have any mitigating affect on duplicate page content? Which URL strategy is best choice from a SEO standpont?
International SEO | | CrownPartners0 -
Different country, same language
I have read the blog posts by Rand and other community members at YouMoz but i still have a question on trageting and domains / sub-directories usage. Suppose, my business is located in France but my prospects are in US and UK as well. The issue is, they are not English speakers but French. If i use ccTLD, i don't think it will rank well in US and UK. gTLD will not be a good option for prospects in France. What should i do? Regards, Shailendra
International SEO | | IM_Learner1 -
Internationalization and SEO
Hi Everyone, This is my first post in this new Q & A section!! This interface looks great!! Now onto the question.... We have www.example.com in English that has 50,000+ URLs. We are in the process of building a new site example.de targeting German users. The German site (www.example.de) will be a mirror of the English site at launch as we want to give a full experience to people visiting the .de domain. However, not all pages will be localized as we can't support that. We are planning on localizing the core sets of pages (~500) and leaving the rest in English. Post launch, we will have additional milestones to localize the remaining pages until the entire site is localized (converted to German). Is this the correct way to go? Will this cause duplicate content issue?
International SEO | | Amjath
Will adding "rel=canonical" tag on these pages solve the purpose? Thanks for the help!0