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?
Will adding "rel=canonical" tag on these pages solve the purpose?Thanks for the help!
-
Thanks for the comments. They have been very useful
-
You're welcome. If the .de site hasn't been online until now then it will be some time before you will earn Google's full trust of course. One thing we've noticed was that websites with higher pagerank / links / trust / authority get indexed more thoroughly (deeper, wider...etc) so enabling for a nice natural link growth would be important in the early days of the site if all that content is going to be indexed by Google. Remember that Google's pagerank is more or less invisible to webmasters these days and when it does update it's really stale as far as data goes. So don't obsess over a toolbar pagerank and think about ideal places to score a great, authoritative link from.
Best of luck with your site release!
-
Hi franciscocmeza
Thanks for the reply. Yes, I had read Google guidelines and scoured Google webmaster central before posting the question here. rel=canonical solution was mentioned in Google guidelines.
I am not able to see the video. YouTube says it's not available. Can you please resend the video link?
-
Hi Dejan,
This is very helpful!! Thank you so much for discussing real life case study.
We are planning to launch .de site (with 500 pages in German and rest in English) in July 2011.
Then over a course of 12 -18 months after that, we will have everything translated in German.
-
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/03/working-with-multi-regional-websites.html
Read the part:
Dealing with duplicate content on global websites
Also watch this video
-
I can tell you exactly what happened to one of our client's websites. We went into a similar debate over a .de and .com domain and as a result of inability to come to an agreement (between SEO and developers) both were released with no canonical handling whatsoever.
The outcome was good, perhaps due to a bit of luck. What happened was that Google figured out that this was another geographic region site and allowed for both pages to be indexed, cached and found in results (one for google.de and the other for google.com.au / google.com). So when I searched for the same sentence in "quotes" it would bring up both results without omitting.
If I can make an educated guess, it would be a mix of geo location (contact details, tld) and the fact that layout added a substatntial amount of difference to both sites (as one layout header, nav, sidebars and fotter were in german and other in english).
In what timeframe are you looking to add german translation to your pages?
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
-
Multilingual webshop SEO
Hi, I have a question concerning multilingual SEO for webshops. This is the case: the root domain is example.be, which has several subdomains. One of these subdomains is shop.example.be which is used for two webshops (Dutch and French), being shop.example.be/nl and shop.example.be/fr .
International SEO | | Mat_C
The other root domain is example.lu (for Luxemburg) which is only used for the subdomain for the Luxemburg webshop in French, being shop.example.lu/fr.
The content on the .lu/fr webshop is a small part of the content on the .be/fr webshop, and the product descriptions are the same and are both of course in French. The webshops will be redesigned and restructured, and the question is what to do with the .lu/fr webshop. There are two possibilities: Integrate this webshop for Luxemburg in the existing .be webshop, since most of the products are the same and the .lu webshop doesn't get a lot of visitors because of Luxemburg being a small country. The only thing to do then would be setting up a 301 from the .lu webshop to the .be/fr version to transfer link value.
People in Luxemburg already sometimes get pages from the .be/fr webshop in the SERP anyway because these already have a bigger authority than the .lu/fr pages. Keep the .lu/fr webshop and use hreflang tags so the correct pages with similar content are shown in the correct country. I know that when using different TLD's this normally isn't an issue anyway, so implementing hreflang tags even isn't really necessary. Please feel free to share your thoughts about what would be the best approach. Thanks!1 -
International corporate SEO - menu and preferences
Hi all, for internationalization we have used subfolders structure (e.g. domain.com/us/) and since we have approx 150 countries to cover, then country selector is quite a link-base, especially if pages itself can have even several hundreds of internal links as well. Currently, all links to other countries are set as rel="nofollow" and I'm planning to change them to "follow" to distribute a juice. Do you please have an experience with such internal links voluminous websites and this follow/nofollow settings? Also we are having and issue with other countries outperforming local search. So for example in US, searching for kind of "Brand America" keyword, our UK branch outperforms US. Hreflangs are set in the sitemaps and each branch (country) is set in search console correctly as well. Since there are some issues with sitemaps (e.g. not actual links, or links returning 404), I assume that google is not using these sitemaps therefore hreflang information is lost as well. Am I correct ? thank you in advance, Tom
International SEO | | execom990 -
Ecommerce Product Page Optimization & International SEO
Hello, I'm working on our website SEO optimization. We have a thousands of products pages with different structures for the languages (arg) and very depth folder path .com/[folder]/[folder]/[folder]/product1.hmtl So now I have the happiness of working on the optimization of the website with themajor risk of impacting all current ranking. But anyway, here are a few questions I have on the way. Part 1 - International URL Our websites target people per country and languages. We do not have shops per countries (not enough resources_) but we try to get at least website per languages. What could be the best option?_ Url Parameters +hreflang So we save one folder less and the proper setup. But I'm just scared it's gonna be too messy for Google URL:.com/product1**?lang=fr** Product page:link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href=".com/product1" / Language folder + hreflang one folder more but clearer structure URL:.com**/fr/**product1 **Product **page:****link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href=".com/product1" / Part 2 - Product URL Our website is structure per categories so the product comes after. However, I've seen a lot of websites recently removing the categories to save folders space. What should be the most efficient option? Category folder It's obviously a good practice but this + the language folder makes already 2 folders URL:.com/categoryA/product1-{targetedKW} {targetedKW} = cheap product, best price or else All in url I've never done it but it somehow makes sense URL:.com/categoryA-product1-{targetedKW} Part 3 - Keyword stuffing As I'd like to get most of it automatically done, what could be the best places to add a few KW. **Markups:**All the ones we can **Meta Descriptions:**optimize one for Google + one for twitter + one for facebook Longer to do but then from google shopping and other automatic links, we could have the perfect or, at least, best description possible **All other option:**Reuse our product name + {targetter KW1 KW2 ...} Product description_ex: content_ Buttons (click to buy)ex: button title="Buy product_name cheap" alt="Purchase product_name"Buy Product name/button Images:same than above Meta:Titles and meta description Hn
International SEO | | omnyex0 -
International SEO & Duplicate Content: ccTLD, hreflang, and relcanonical tags
Hi Everyone, I have a client that has two sites (example.com & example.co.uk) each have the same English content, but no hreflang or rel="canonical" tags in place. Would this be interpreted as duplicate content? They haven't changed the copy to speak to specific regions, but have tried targeting the UK with a ccTLD. I've taken a look at some other comparable question on MOZ like this post - > https://moz.com/community/q/international-hreflang-will-this-handle-duplicate-content where one of the answers says **"If no translation is happening within a geo-targeted site, HREFLANG is not necessary." **If hreflang tags are not necessary, then would I need rel="canonical" to avoid duplicate content? Thanks for taking the time to help a fellow SEO out.
International SEO | | ccox10 -
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 -
Is Seo Effected by Switching Hosting Services?
I currently own a domain that is hosting by yahoo! However, they have no blog and they are not "responsive" to smart and mobile phones. I am looking to go from Yahoo! Hosting to maybe hostagor and looking to go from static to CMS for seo purposes. My fear is of loosing SERP's as I do rank good for some majotr local keywords. Any opinions? James
International SEO | | jimmy02250 -
Global SEO - How quickly/aggressively should one expand into multiple countries?
SITUATION: Our client is a global company lacking the global presence, so naturally the idea is performing international/global SEO in each country. For benchmarking purposes, our plan is to focus on a select number of keywords (ie 8-15) for each country and begin link building within each respective country. All SEO effort (ie. link building) will be for sub-folders (ie. www.client.com/subfolder/) on the same top level domain. Note, each country may have multiple languages, so each language will be broken out as it's own unique SEO campaign with it's very own strategy and link building efforts. For example: Mexico has 2 languages (English & Spanish) and will be considered 2 separate campaigns. PROBLEM: The client wants to be extremely aggressive and perform SEO on 3 new countries every month. This amounts to 36 new countries/SEO campaigns per year. Assuming each country has 2 languages each, we are looking at 6 SEO campaigns per month, or 72 per year. Our concern is that since all SEO effort will be performed on the same top level domain, we may be growing too fast and the search engines may consider the addition of these new pages and links to be too 'spammy'. We'd love to hear some feedback or personal experience on what might be considered a "safe" or "healthy" expansion into different countries. Thanks!
International SEO | | ByteLaunch0 -
International SEO whats best 2 sites co.uk and com.au ?
We have the co.uk and com.au ccTLDS and currently operate out of the UK only but plans are in place for Australia. We can't get hold of the .org or .com so it has to be the ccTLD. I want to use the same site for both countries and either host 2 identical sites (same content) or 1 site with different domain names + meta tags for the 2 countries. Whats the best way to make this happen without screwing things up?
International SEO | | therealmarkhall0