SEO for Subdomains for different languages .com/fr, .com/es
-
Hi All,
I was wondering how best to to approach optimisation of a site that exists on a single .com domain, but has different subfolders for different languages.
The site is a .com and it has subfolders for French, Spanish, Russian and English. The business is situated in France and the vast majority of clients are French and English speakers.
I've read that it's possible to geo target these subfolders using webmaster tools however I believe this is an inferior method of optimisation than having tld's. Just wondered if anyone had experience of htis and could provide any advice ? As they won't be rebuilding the site for another year or so I wondered if there were any quick wins?
My second question is to do with how best to set these campaigns up within SEO Moz. would it be better to track at a subdomain or subfolder leverl (for different languages)?
If someone could advise I would greatly appreciate it!
Thanks,
vantresca
-
Hi Gianluca,
Thanks very much for the helpful response. I agree with your recommendation, linking building across authoritative sites for each of the languages targeted is probably the best way to approach this.
Interestingly, Google Analytics indicates that the vast majority of French (language) visitors are indeed from France, with less than 6% coming from other french speaking countries, so I think it makes sense to register a country top level domain in future to ensure the best chance at competitive visibility here (and in the UK, US).
What you've written about Yandex is very interesting. I myself am new to global SEO so will be doing research. I will also email seomoz to see exactly how best to handle the subfolders.
Thanks again!
-
Hi Vantresca.
I think it is better to clear thing about how International SEO works.
First of all I see a contradiction between your question (when you talk about geo targeting folders or better using cTld), then in this answer here above, when you talk about languages.
Remember: to target a country is not the same as targeting a language speaking population. The example you give (French) is quite clear about this difference.
That means that if you are targeting a language and the people talking that language, the first thing you must discard is the use of an Country level domain name, because that would mean you are targeting the country of the cTld (.es.> Spain - .fr = France...).
But that mean also that you should not have to indicate to Google to geo target any subfolder for any particular country. Ideally every language folder of the site should have to be crawled and shown globally, in order to be found by all the people speaking those language (i.e.: French, Canadians of Quebec, but also all the African nation speaking French..
More over, you cannot use any classic geo targeting signal, as currency, addresses or else.
And, also, you should pay attention to the version of the language used, as - for instance - the french spoken in Quebec is really different from the one spoken in Paris. In that case you should use the most "standardized" version of french, a neutral french.
So... if your site has French, Spanish, English (or Russian I'll talk later), and you want those languages ranks well in every possible country those languages are spoken, the only tactic you have to use is link building, creating as much campaigns as the languages are and not thinking in outreaching sites from France, again taking French as an example, but from sites of every country were French is an official language.
About Russian, my suggestion is to prioritize the migration to an .ru domain if you think to compete in Yandex, as Yandex give a clear preference to Russian country level domains.
Related to your question about if it is possible to create a campaign on a subfolder level, honestly I cannot answer that question, as I've never had that need. But I would address the helpteam regarding this doubt, because they can tell you in details if Roger-bot will crawl your data (as you have requested) or not. You can contact them at help@seomoz.org
-
Hi Kane
We're a Belgian marketing and communicationagency and we're using SEOmoz for multi-language sites. We've got the same question as vantresca.
We'd like to run a campaign for www.masser.be. This site exists both in Dutch (NL) and French (FR). We were also thinking to run seperate campaigns. One for www.masser.be/nl and one for www.masser.be/fr.
Since you were going to defer someone else's opinion in this multi-language questions, we were wondering if you did so already?
Kind regards and thanks already.
Kim
-
Sorry, I can't help much re: multiple languages and how you should be tracking. I would probably track each subfolder as a separate campaign, but I'm going to defer to someone else's opinion on this question, since I don't deal with multi-language sites.
-
Thanks very much for this Kane!
This article is very helpful as I do think geo targeting can be limiting for languages like French that aren't restricted to a single geographic region.
In terms of the campaign set up within SEO moz, is there any point in tracking sub folders separately? I am considering geographic targeting for the russian language version (.com/ru) and it probably makes sense to track this separately for visibility on Yandex, right? What do you think?
-
Google Webmaster Blog posted this recently: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/12/new-markup-for-multilingual-content.html
They don't explicitly say that doing this will result in 'geo-targeting,' but if a site is presented as the "version for users in Mexico, in Spanish", you can bet that Google will likely be showing that content to Google.com.mx searches.
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
-
Is this approach of returning different content depending on IP beneficial for international SEO?
I've decided to use sub folders for my site, and from everything I've read online it seems I shouldn't change the page content depending on IP, yet I know of a successful well funded site that hires full time SEO staff that does just that, and I'm wondering whether they know something I don’t which is helping their SEO. From everything I've read online this is the format I think I should use: mysite.com/us/red-wigs mysite.com/gb/red-wigs mysite.com/red-wigs does not exist This is the format the other site is using: othersite.com/red-wigs (from US IP address) othersite.com/red-wigs (from UK IP address) othersite.com/gb/red-wigs The content on othersite.com/red-wigs is identical to othersite.com/gb/red-wigs when loading from a UK IP address, and a lot of URLs without /gb/ are being returned when searching google. The benefit I can think of that they are gaining is US pages which are being returned for UK based searches will return the correct content. Are their any other gains to this approach? I'm concerned that if I use this approach for different languages then the radically differing content of othersite.com/red-wigs depending on the location of the crawler might confuse google - also generally changing content depending on IP seems to be recommended against. Thanks
International SEO | | Mickooo0 -
How to interlink 16 different language versions of site?
I remember that Matt Cutts recommended against interlinking many language versions of a site.
International SEO | | lcourse
Considering that google now also crawls javascript links, what is best way to implement interlinking? I still see otherwhise extremely well optimized large sites interlinking to more than 10 different language versions e.g. zalando.de, but also booking.com (even though here on same domain). Currently we have an expandable css dropdown in the footer interlinking 16 different language versions with different TLD. Would you be concerned? What would you suggest how to interlink domains (for user link would be useful)?0 -
Direct traffic is up 2100% (due to a bot/crawler I believe)
Hi, The direct traffic to website www.webgain.dk has increased by over 2100% recently. I can see that most of it is from US (my target audience is in Denmark and the website is in danish).
International SEO | | WebGain
What can I do about this? All this traffic gives my website a bounce rate of 99.91% for direct traffic. I believe it is some sort of bot/crawler. 2100percentboost.png0 -
302 Redirect based on Language Detection
Hi, Our online application, magento e-commerce, has a script that detects browser language and does a 302 redirection to the language of choice ... www.mydomain.com/en/ or www.mydomain.com/es/ What's the SEO angle on this? Should I be concerned? thanks, Ben
International SEO | | bjs20100 -
Freelancer.com: Same Content on Different TLD?
Take a look at freelancer.com and freelancer.in. Both have the same content. I check for rel=canonical and freelancer.in has one to itself. Not to the .com version. Both the sites are indexed in Google as well. Do you think high authority sites like freelancer can get away with duplicate content?
International SEO | | jombay0 -
.com AND .co.uk.
Many of the massive sites (like Amazon) are using both .com and .co.uk. For smaller sites, is this a good way to rank highly on Google.com and .co.uk? Is there a way to do this without duplicating content or diluting link juice?
International SEO | | ojwilliams80 -
MozCast.com - What happened on the 27th? Hottest day of the month!
MozCast.com - What happened on the 27th? Hottest day of the month! Anyone got any idea of what changed in the Algo on this day? Cheers.
International SEO | | activitysuper1 -
Site with multiple languages
We are building a Joomla site for a customer that has an USA division and a South American division (english and spanish). The products and services are the same. I am trying to understand the best posible way to architect the site. 1- Do I create 1 site with duplicate pages in different languages? Does Google recognize that it is duplicate content if different languages are used? 2- Do I create seperate sub domains for each language? 3- Should I just use Google translate to translate the pages as required? The problem here is that each site has a different geographic target. any other alternatives?
International SEO | | brantwadz0