2 Language Versions on Same URL
-
A site we are working on is a large gift retailer in Canada. They have a language option for French, but the page URLs are the same.
If you click 'French' in the header, a cookie is set and then all pages are dynamically served the French content (and all nav/site elements of course change to French).
The URLs then are exactly the same as it's the cookie that determines the language option to serve. e.g. www.site.ca/index.php?category=7&product=99.... would be the same regardless of if I'm set for English or French.
Question: Does this setup have a negative impact on any SEO factors?
The site has several thousand pages.
-
Please read this, from Google Webmasters Central:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=40349&query=cookies&topic=&type=
Make your site easily accessible
"Build your site with a logical link structure. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
Use a text browser, such as Lynx, to examine your site. Most spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Macromedia Flash keep you from seeing your entire site in a text browser, then spiders may have trouble crawling it. "
- Based on this, my initial thoughts are that Google will only crawl and index the default language version of the page. I would look to append something to the URL to differentiate the two language versions.
I've subscribed to this thread because this is something I'm interested in too, I hope someone else with a little more experience can clarify this for us both, but in the mean time have a read of the above! I hope it helps
- Aaron
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
-
All URLs in the site is 302 redirected to itself
Hi everyone, I have a problem with a website wherein all URLs (homepage, inner pages) are 302 redirected. This is based on Screaming Frog crawl. But the weird thing is that they are 302 redirected to themselves which doesn't make any sense. Example:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alex_goldman
https://www.example.com.au/ is 302 redirected to https://www.example.com.au/ https://www.example.com.au/shop is 302 redirected to https://www.example.com.au/shop https://www.example.com.au/shop/dresses is 302 redirected to https://www.example.com.au/shop/dresses Have you encountered this issue? What did you do to fix it? Would be very glad to hear your responses. Cheers!0 -
Image URL Change Catastrophe
We have a site with over 3mm pages indexed, and an XML sitemap with over 12mm images (312k indexed at peak). Last week our traffic dropped off a cliff. The only major change we made to the site in that time period was adding a DNS record for all of our images that moved them from a SoftLayer Object Storage domain to a subdomain of our site. The old URLs still work, but we changed all the links from across our site to the new subdomain. The big mistake we made was that we didn't update our XML sitemap to the new URLs until almost a week after the switch (totally forgot that they were served from a process with a different config file). We believe this was the cause of the issue because: The pages that dropped in traffic were the ones where the images moved, while other pages stayed more or less the same. We have some sections of our property where the images are, and have always been, hosted by Amazon and their rankings didn't crater. Same with pages that do not have images in the XML sitemap (like list pages). There wasn't a change in geographic breakdown of our traffic, which we looked at because the timing was around the same time as Pigeon. There were no warnings or messages in Webmaster Tools, to indicate a manual action around something unrelated. The number of images indexed in our sitemap according Webmaster Tools dropped from 312k to 10k over the past week. The gap between the change and the drop was 5 days. It takes Google >10 to crawl our entire site, so the timing seems plausible. Of course, it could be something totally unrelated and just coincidence, but we can't come up with any other plausible theory that makes sense given the timing and pages affected. The XML sitemap was updated last Thursday, and we resubmitted it to Google, but still no real change. Anyone had a similar experience? Any way to expedite the climb back to normal traffic levels? Screen%20Shot%202014-07-29%20at%203.38.34%20PM.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wantering0 -
2 links from the same external page question
Hi, I have always thought if 2 links on a single page, both going to the same url wouldnt pass PR from both. I watched a Matt Cutts vid and he was saying in the original algo it was built in that both links would pass PR. So for example if I guest posted say 1000 words and this article had 2 links pointing to the same url would they both work? Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bondara0 -
Pretty URLs... do they matter?
Given the following urls: example.com/warriors/ninjas/ example.com/warriors/ninjas/cid=WRS-NIN01 Is there any difference from an SEO perspective? Aesthetically the 2nd bugs me but that's not a statistical difference. Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nymbot0 -
Foreign Language Directories
I have a client whose site has each page in multiple languages. each is in specific directories. Needless to say each page is showing up with the same site title, meta data, and content. When my campaigns are crawled they show up as thousands of page errors. Should i add each of these into robots.txt? would this fix the issue of duplicate content?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gkellyiii0 -
Foreign Language Hot Trends
I want to know the top trending words in countries other than USA. Any suggestions for an alternative to Google "Hot Searches" in Australia, Germany, Russia and Sweden? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter0 -
Best multi-language site strategy?
When reading about multi-language site structure, general knowledge says that there are 2 right ways of doing it right: Assign one domain per region/ language: www.domain.fr www.domain.de www.domain.co.uk ... If a country has more than one language, such as Switzerland, you can create folders for those languages: www.domain.ch/fr - in french www.domain.ch/de - in german Have a unique domain www.domain.com for the whole site and create folders for language region: www.domina.com/fr www.domain.com/uk ... If a language is spoken in more than one country, you can create subfolders www.domain.com/fr-ch - french in switzerland www.domain.com/de-ch - german in switzerland At first sight, it seems that option 1 is the right one. However, sites such as www.apple.com are using option 2. I am unable to decide... what would you recommend? Any objective criteria?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | hockerty0 -
URL Length or Exact Breadcrumb Navigation URL? What's More Important
Basically my question is as follows, what's better: www.romancingdiamonds.com/gemstone-rings/amethyst-rings/purple-amethyst-ring-14k-white-gold (this would fully match the breadcrumbs). or www.romancingdiamonds.com/amethyst-rings/purple-amethyst-ring-14k-white-gold (cutting out the first level folder to keep the url shorter and the important keywords are closer to the root domain). In this question http://www.seomoz.org/qa/discuss/37982/url-length-vs-url-keywords I was consulted to drop a folder in my url because it may be to long. That's why I'm hesitant to keep the bradcrumb structure the same. To the best of your knowldege do you think it's best to drop a folder in the URL to keep it shorter and sweeter, or to have a longer URL and have it match the breadcrumb structure? Please advise, Shawn
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Romancing0