Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Same blog, multiple languages. Got SEO concerns.
-
Hi,
My company runs a small blog in swedish. Most of the visitors are our customers/prospects. We will write about generic concepts regarding our business and the occasional company news story.
However, I have quite a few ideas for articles that could be interesting to a lot of people, and I'm tempted to write those in english for better exposure. I would love it if that exposure could boost my companies authority.
How should I go on about this? Can I somehow tell search engines that a certain part or page of the site is in another language? Should I translate our entire site to english and post the english post in a separate blog feed?
Any insight is welcome.
Thanks in advance!
-
Hi Nils,
If you aren't producing translated content, but are just going to put some posts out in English, I do not believe you will see a problem. You could consider putting the English content into a subfolder like /en/ and including a header such as http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en"> in the head. You could also target that subfolder to an English speaking country in Webmaster Tools, but you can't pick more than one country, so that doesn't seem the right option here (i.e. you'd have to choose the UK, US, or another place, and if you're trying to get visitors from all over the world, that could hinder your rankings in all locations bar the country you choose).
If your entire website is geo-targeted to Sweden, either by a .se domain name or geo-targeting in WMT already, you might have a harder time ranking in foreign countries as Google has been told that the entirety of the site is for the Swedish market. However, on a generic TLD like .com, you should be able to pick up a good amount of search traffic from other markets with English content.
-
Thank you all for your answers, but I'm not entirely convinced that this solves my problem.
There won't be an swedish version of the same content, so specifying an alternative language doesn't seem right. Hopefully it's better than doing nothing, but I would've felt more at ease if I could specify it on anchor tags linking to the page, and "globally" for that page alone.
If there is no other solution, it makes me feel like I really should translate the entire site/blog...
-
Good article here on Moz that may interest you: Using the Correct Hreflang Tag: A New Generator Tool
-
I handle this using the hrefland tag in the
It looks like this for each page of the site (on my site English/Spanish):
-
Hi there,
the rel=alternative sounds like a great tag for you, it works best on a whole page translation compared to part of it but that's easy to do. If you had a site like www.example.com/en/blogpost you could then set up the alt tag on that for other languages (English in the example).
Hope that helps a bit
-
If you plan on translating a part to another language, I would use the hreflang tag to tell search engines that two pages are identical, just in different languages. Then search engines can serve the correct version of the page to whoever is searching based on their language preferences.
If a nice chunk of your customers prefer English, I would look into creating a English version of your entire website.
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
-
Multiple Locations Same City
I have a local seo campaign im trying to reconfigure. Lets say i am a dwi lawyer and i have multiple locations. These are merely examples for cities and keywords. Home page is Criminal defense lawyer - this is the term we should be targeting. Maybe i can target the state name, but i am losing so much SEO weight by not leveraging this home page as the main page for this term. Then we have a location page in south Boston that is "S Boston DWI lawyer" as the title tag. Then we have another location page north Boston that is "N Boston DWI Lawyer" as the title tag. I can leave the city name off the home page title tag, but then what do i do with these pages that are pretty much competing with one another? I know the home page will not rank since none of the locations point to it, and only to a location page. I was thinking about creating one page with both locations and having both G map listings go directly there, but that doesn't make sense because other locations do not have the same setup. Or choosing the most central location and pointing that to the home page and let the rest have a locations page. Finally the home page will not rank well for any major terms. The location page does rank for the fictional south Boston DWI lawyer, but the other listing does not show up. The home page does not show up in the first ten pages either. One other aspect is that the home page ranks for terms that I am not even targeting. These pages are all targeted on specific keywords so that they do not overlap or compete, but some pages are the services main outline, but the location pages have their own version. I have removed all mentions of the same keyword from the home page. I made a few wchanges about 2 weeks ago and already noticed movement in rankings days later.
Local Website Optimization | | waqid0 -
SEO Best Practice for Managing a Businesses NAP with Multiple Addresses
I have a client with multiple business addresses - 3 across 3 states, from an SEO perspective what would be the best approach for displaying a NAP on the website? So far I've read that its best: to get 3 GMB account to point to 3 location pages & use a local phone number as opposed to a 1300 number. Display all 3 locations in the footer, run of site
Local Website Optimization | | jasongmcmahon1 -
Can I use Schema zip code markup that includes multiple zip codes but no actual address?
The company doesn't have physical locations but offers services in multiple cities and states across the US. We want to develop a better hyperlocal SEO strategy and implement schema but the only address information available is zip codes, names of cities and state. Can we omit the actual street address in the formatting but add multiple zipcodes?
Local Website Optimization | | hristina-m0 -
Multi location silo seo technique
A physical therapy company has 8 locations in one city and 4 locations in another with plans to expand. I've seen two methods to approach this. The first I feel is sloppy and that is the individual url for each location that points to from the location pages on the main domain. The second is to use the silo technique incorporated with metro scale addition. You have the main domain with the number of silos (individual stores) and each silo has its own content (what they do at each store is pretty much the same). My question is should the focus of each silo, besides making sure there is no duplicate copy, to increase their own hyperlocal outreach? Focus on social, reviews, content curated for the specific location. How would you attack this problem?
Local Website Optimization | | Ohmichael1 -
Using geolocation for dynamic content - what's the best practice for SEO?
Hello We sell a product globally but I want to use different keywords to describe the product based on location. For this example let’s say in USA the product is a "bathrobe" and in Canada it’s a "housecoat" (same product, just different name). What this means… I want to show "bathrobe" content in USA (lots of global searches) and "housecoat" in Canada (less searches). I know I can show the content using a geolocation plugin (also found a caching plugin which will get around the issue of people seeing cached versions), using JavaScript or html5. I want a solution which enables someone in Canada searching for "bathrobe" to be able to find our site through Google search though too. I want to rank for "bathrobe" in BOTH USA and Canada. I have read articles which say Google can read the dynamic content in JavaScript, as well as the geolocation plugin. However the plugins suggest Google crawls the content based on location too. I don’t know about JavaScript. Another option is having two separate pages (one for “bathrobe” and one for “housecoat”) and using geolocation for the main menu (if they find the other page i.e. bathrobe page through a Canadian search, they will still see it though). This may have an SEO impact splitting the traffic though. Any suggestions or recommendations on what to do?? What do other websites do? I’m a bit stuck. Thank you so much! Laura Ps. I don’t think we have enough traffic to add subdomains or subdirectories.
Local Website Optimization | | LauraFalls0 -
How Google's Doorway Pages Update Affects Local SEO
Hey Awesome Local Folks! I thought I'd take a proactive stance and start a thread on the new doorway pages update from Google, as I feel there will be questions coming up about this here in the forum: Here's the update announcement: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2015/03/an-update-on-doorway-pages.html And here's the part that will make local business owners and Local SEOs take a second glance at this: Here are questions to ask of pages that could be seen as doorway pages: Do the pages duplicate useful aggregations of items (locations, products, etc.) that already exist on the site for the purpose of capturing more search traffic? I think this will naturally lead to questions about the practice of creating local/city landing pages. At this point, my prediction is that this will come down to high quality vs. crummy quality pages of this type. In fact, after chatting briefly with Andrew Shotland, I'm leaning a bit toward seeing the above language as being strongly geared toward directory type sites and large franchises. I recommend reading Andrew's post about his take on this, as I think he's on the right track: http://www.localseoguide.com/googles-about-to-close-your-local-doorway-pages/ So, I'm feeling at this point that if you've made the right efforts to develop unique, high quality local landing pages, you should be good unless you are an accidental casualty of an over-zealous update. We'll see! If anyone has thoughts to contribute on this thread, I hope they will, and if lots of questions start coming up about this here in the community, feel free to link back to this thread in helping your fellow community members 🙂 Thanks, all!
Local Website Optimization | | MiriamEllis9 -
Image URLs changed 3 times after using a CDN - How to Handle for SEO?
Hi Mozzers,
Local Website Optimization | | emerald
Hoping for your advice on how to handle the SEO effects an image URL change, that changed 3 times, during the course of setting up a CDN over a month period, as follows: (URL 1) - Original image URL before CDN:www.mydomain.com/images/abc.jpg (URL 2) - First CDN URL (without CNAME alias - using WPEngine & their own CDN):
username.net-dns.com/images/abc.jpg (URL 3) - Second CDN URL (with CNAME alias - applied 3 weeks later):
cdn.mydomain.com/images/abc.jpg When we changed to URL 2, our image rankings in the Moz Tool Pro Rankings dropped from 80% to 5% (the one with the little photo icons). So my questions for recovery are: Do I need to add a 301 redirect/Canonical tag from the old image URL 1 & 2 to URL 3 or something else? Do I need to change my image sitemap to use cdn.mydomain.com/images/abc.jpg instead of www.? Thanks in advance for your advice.0 -
Does the Location of my Server effect my SEO?
Does the geographic Location of my Server effect my SEO? HELP US! We are arguing for 3 weeks already. My partner has mentioned multiple times in the past that "since 2013 google does not require your server to be in the country you are targeting for seo"
Local Website Optimization | | DanielBernhardt
And that actually all they care about is if its a good and fast server - not where its physically located in the world. I am a strong believer that the geographic location of your server directly effects your SEO ranking... lets say if you want to target www.google.ru for your seo, best you have a server located in Russia for hosting your website.. WHO IS RIGHT? Choose the winner and base the facts.
If anybody has the correct answer and information to base it on it will help us alot - and maybe even spare some unnecessary violent between us two! we found some articles across the web, sadly they are all dated back to 2012.... Thanks in Advance for all the help guys!0