Do non-english(localized) URLs help Local SEO and user experience?

[Amjath]

Hi Everyone,

This question is about URL best practice for multilingual websites.

We have www.example.com in English and we are building the exact replica of English site in German www.example.de.

On the Geman site, we are considering to translate some portions of the URLs for example last folder and file name as seen below:

example.de/folder1-in-english/folder2-in-english/folder3-in-german/filename-in-german.html

Is this a good idea? Will this help SEO and user experience both? or the mixed languagues in URL will confuse the users?

Google guidelines say that this should be ok.

Would love to get feedback from SEOMOZ community!

Thanks,

Supriya.

[Amjath]

Thank you so much Neil! That helps!!

[NeilInFrance]

As an SEO you're obliged to say translate all the folder names.

If you want to optimize your site for search engines, it is strongly recommended to use keywords in the Urls of the pages you'd like to see in the SERPs ; Its not compulsory, though, and with non-competitive terms you may get good rankings without it. A lot of sites have urls like mysite.com/index.php?page=123 and still rank well

A German site has German keywords obviously and you should have these words in your Url if you want an optimized site

If you're saying that technical reasons you can't do this, you'll have to make extra efforts elsewhere

Make sure that you have a fully translated breadcrumbs and navigation menus ... but if you can do this you shouldn't really be that far off translating the urls

• Neil

[Amjath]

Hi Sameer,

Thanks for the reply! I am not worried about the content.

We needed some direction on URL rules. Translating entire folder structure in german is not feasible in phase 1 of this project hence we thought of translating just the last folder and filename in german. Actually the example link that I used in the original question does not display properly. Let me try again

example.de/folder1-in-english/folder2-in-english/folder3-in-german/filename-in-german.html

[petrakraft]

I strongly suggest keeping the german url's on the german domain, too.
For usability and for seo purpose.
The Germans won't search for the english terms and text - so it is kind of useless, too.

If you don't have the possibility to translate your whole website and you want to add those pages where you don't have any translation put at least a GERMAN url on the page. Then you can explain in short terms that this page is only existing in english language and refer them to the english dependant - or even put in the Google translation widget (but we all know that this is  not a perfect translation at all, but better than nothing).

[ThomasHgenhaven]

Hi there

I don't really see any usability nor seo reasons for using English keywords in your folders. Why not just translate it all into German? That is, in my opinion, the best long term strategy.

You are probably considering keeping the folders in English because it is easier. But it is a thing you'd probably want to change eventually. So although it is a hassle, you can aswell get it done

[ninjamarketer]

As long as you launch the site on a domain with proper local TLD (.de in your case) and add locally targeted content you should be ok. If possible try to host the website in the same country you are targeting.

Google has become much smarter in terms of detecting the geo local elements and it should serve the appropriate site on the SERP.

As far the mixing languages goes, it would not be a wise thing to do because it could impact usability. Is there a specific reason on why you are translating only a few pages in German? I could relate to an example where one of my customers mixed English with a local language on the local TLD website. The bounce rate went to the roof and users did not like it. They complained about this on the support chats and web forms. The issue was fixed and the bounce rate went down.