Multilingual website in Belgium?
-
Hi Mozzers,
I have a question about a multilingual website for a client for us in Belgium. As you guys know in Belgium we speak French and Dutch.
The situation:
At the moment we have client.be for the Dutch version of the website and client.be/fr for the French version. All tagged with href lang tags and webmaster tools.The client wants to build a new website. There are three possibilities:
1. We keep using subfolders (same configuration as the current situation). In my head this would be my first choice.
2. We just let them build two separate domains.
client-keywordindutch.be & client-keywordinfrench.be3. We use subdomains.
As the development company is not sure that it is technically possible to use subdomains, I need to know which option is the next best one and which option you would give priority and why? Should we just push through with the subfolder?
Thank you for your thoughts!
Sander -
We do our best
-
Thank you for your reply Joris! Good to see some Belgians participating on Moz :).
-
Those Belgians with their languages... says another Belgian.
I would go for subfolders as well, and keep the original domain name as it already has built some credibility in search engines.
-
Thanks again Patrick! This confirms my assumption.
-
Hi there
For me, if you're trying to target specific languages with your new site, I would use subdirectories. If it's an issue to do subdomains, you're better off building directories and targeting those specifically.
Hope this helps! Good luck!
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
-
Website Server Issue?
I'm getting error messages that a website cannot be crawled and it might be due to the following issues: Couldn't access the webpage because the server either timed out or refused/closed the connection before our crawler could receive a response. How to fix: Please contact your web hosting technical support team and ask them to fix the issue Could Possibly Be:
Web Design | | PrimeMediaConsulting
1. DDoS protection system.
OR
2. Overloaded or misconfigured server They asked me to talk to my hosting company about this issue and he's at a loss (I don't think he knows everything he needs to know potentially). Have you seen these issues before? Where is the best spot to start troubleshooting this issue?0 -
How to prevent development website subdomain from being indexed?
Hello awesome MOZ Community! Our development team uses a sub-domain "dev.example.com" for our SEO clients' websites. This allows changes to be made to the dev site (U/X changes, forms testing, etc.) for client approval and testing. An embarrassing discovery was made. Naturally, when you run a "site:example.com" the "dev.example.com" is being indexed. We don't want our clients websites to get penalized or lose killer SERPs because of duplicate content. The solution that is being implemented is to edit the robots.txt file and block the dev site from being indexed by search engines. My questions is, does anyone in the MOZ Community disagree with this solution? Can you recommend another solution? Would you advise against using the sub-domain "dev." for live and ongoing development websites? Thanks!
Web Design | | SproutDigital0 -
New Re-design will my website rankings drop?
Hi guys, I have had to re-design my site although we are only 4 months into the seo game we have seen some good progress with our rankings. My question is there anything I need to consider before implementing the new designs so it doesn't effect my current rankings or any of our SEO work. Our current designs are content thing and so we have had to create more content to better optimize our site, however if doing so will this loose our current ranking position? Apperciate any advice around this Thanks
Web Design | | edward-may0 -
Is it important to keep your website home index page simple to rank better?
My website http://www.endeavourcottage.co.uk/ markets holiday cottages and it's grown from my own singular cottage into a small letting agency and I used to rank at best number 3 for the short tailed keywords like Whitby holiday cottages with its drop-down to position 10 on Google.co.uk. So this week I was looking for a UK business to help me improve my rankings and the first thing they said was my home page is detrimental with the listing too many conflicting info with it advertising all 12 properties on it. They suggested a door entry page into the site keeping it simple but when I run it through the analysing tool here on Moz for "Whitby holiday cottages" as an example it came out looking okay. I do the usual things of title tags and meta descriptions for my keywords etc any suggestions or advice would be very welcome thank you Alan
Web Design | | WhitbyHolidayCottages0 -
Best Practices for home page design for ecommerce website
I know this question is not directly related to SEO, but I figured I have been getting some good help from this forum, so why not? The website is www.vrtack.com. I am looking to redesign the home page. It is an ecommerce website selling equestrian clothing and leather goods. My goals are: 1. Reduce the very high bounce rate and drop-off rate. 2. Fine tune the relevancy of the website towards a handful of keyword phrases. 3. Engage the visitor to create better click-through and to increase the average time spent on the page/site. 4. Page Loading time is of importance. It has to load quickly. I would love to hear some specific suggestions, examples, best practices.
Web Design | | amitramani0 -
Website redesign testing environment
An external company is redesigning our website. They have a draft version active in a folder on their website to enable us to view it (example: www.externalcompanywebsite.com/ourwebsite/). There is no permission required to view the website, anyone with the url could just go there. I am not sure if they're using the robots.txt to block crawlers, or if they're blocking specific ip addresses. If the engines are allowed to crawl their website and they index pages of our draft website, does that affect our website negatively in the future once we host it on our domain?
Web Design | | jdossetti0 -
SEO list for creating the *perfect* website
If you could build your website from scratch and have your developers do anything you want (within reason), what list of SEO requirements would you send them? Does anyone know of any good articles on the perfect SEO wish list? Happy Holidays!
Web Design | | MirandaP1 -
How does the "first link" rule work with the "reasonable surfer patent" when it comes to the main navigation for a website?
In trying to figure out navigation for a new website, I am struggling with the first link rule vs. the reasonable surfer patent where the first link rule implies that Google "counts" the first link to a page including navigation, and the reasonable surfer patent that implies that navigation links carry less weight than body copy links. What is the best solution for creating main navigation so that it doesn't take away from the body copy links?
Web Design | | cindyt-170380