2 Language Versions on Same URL
-
A site we are working on is a large gift retailer in Canada. They have a language option for French, but the page URLs are the same.
If you click 'French' in the header, a cookie is set and then all pages are dynamically served the French content (and all nav/site elements of course change to French).
The URLs then are exactly the same as it's the cookie that determines the language option to serve. e.g. www.site.ca/index.php?category=7&product=99.... would be the same regardless of if I'm set for English or French.
Question: Does this setup have a negative impact on any SEO factors?
The site has several thousand pages.
-
Please read this, from Google Webmasters Central:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=40349&query=cookies&topic=&type=
Make your site easily accessible
"Build your site with a logical link structure. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
Use a text browser, such as Lynx, to examine your site. Most spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Macromedia Flash keep you from seeing your entire site in a text browser, then spiders may have trouble crawling it. "
- Based on this, my initial thoughts are that Google will only crawl and index the default language version of the page. I would look to append something to the URL to differentiate the two language versions.
I've subscribed to this thread because this is something I'm interested in too, I hope someone else with a little more experience can clarify this for us both, but in the mean time have a read of the above! I hope it helps
- Aaron
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
-
Url title and then category vice versa
We have recently developed a site with the structure of domain.com/page-title/about/category Instead of the traditional domain.com/category/page-title We want to optimize more on each single article rather than the category its in. However now we get the info from a seo company that this is rather a bad idea and it hurts the SEO performance because google doesnt understand the structure. The archive page of each category is domain.com/category/overview Whats your input on this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Preen0 -
CMS Pages - Multiple URLS (/)
Hi guys, this type of question has been asked a few times before but I couldn't find something that told me what i need so apologies if its a tad repetitive. I use Magento, and have several pages using its CMS. However, it produces 2 URLS for each page with a simple /. For example, website.com/hire
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ATP
website.com/hire/ I know google treats this as 2 separate pages, which would be the better solution. 1. Write a URL re-write for every CMS page
RewriteRule ^hire$ http://www.website.com/hire/ [R=301,L] (Is this right?) 2. Write a general rewrite rule to always add the /
No idea where to begin with this 3. Add a Canonical tag to the page which i think is possible in magento by adding this to the Custom Design Layout XML option in the page CMS. <action method="addLinkRel"></action> <rel>canonical</rel> <href>http://www.website.com/hire/</href> This would make the /hire/ page self-reference and the /hire page reference the /hire/ page I think. Which one of these solutions is the best and any pointers with the coding would be grand.0 -
URL Formatting - Magento
Hi, We are working with a client on Mangento who URLs are formatting Google friendly eg; productname.html - as seen in site search in Google) but when you click the link to the site it is adding on #.VEWKQxbc754 (or similar) The site is also having some page indexing problems as well Thoughts? specific settings/Add on in magento?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Pure-SEO0 -
Google Disavow wrong Sample URLs
Sometime last year we were penalized for unnatural links by Google. We followed a couple of good posts on MOZ on how to go about correcting all of this (Excel Showing work, Google Docs, Ahrefs, semrush, etc...) and submitted a reconsideration request as well as a list of urls using Disavow Tool. So today, about 20 days later, we get a reply from Google stating that we still have some links that are outside their quality guidelines with 3 examples. Problem is, none of the 3 examples they listed have our website on them. I even did a View Source and checked all our inbound link reports for these websites. All of the 3 examples are Lawyer / Legal Advise websites and ours has nothing to do with this. Any ideas on how to reply and ask them to double check? Maybe they mixed up with another account they were working on at the same time.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Apex-Lighting0 -
SEO benefit of tracked URLs
I've found a lot of mixed info on this topic so I thought I'd ask the experts (Moz community). If I'm adding tracking parameters to URLs to monitor organic traffic will this affect the rank/value of the original clean URL? If so, would best practice be to 301 redirect the tracked URL to the original:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IceIcebaby
i.e. redirect www.example.com/category/?DZID=Organic_G_NP/SQ&utm_source=Organic&utm_medium=Google TO www.example.com/category Thanks for your help!
-Reed0 -
CHange insite Urls structure
Hello Guys! I have a situation with a website and I need some opinions. Today, the structured of my site is: (I have had this site architecture since many years) Main country home (www.mysite.com.tld) o Product_1 Home (www.mysite.com.tld/product1/) § Product_1 articles www.mysite.com.tld/product1/product1_art1 www.mysite.com.tld/product1/product1_art2 www.mysite.com.tld/product1/product1_artx o Product_2 Home (www.mysite.com.tld/product2/) § Product_2 articles www.mysite.com.tld/product1/product2_art1 www.mysite.com.tld/product1/product2_art2 www.mysite.com.tld/product1/product2_artx I have several TLDs with their main and their products. We are thinking in modify this structure and begin to use subdomains for each product (The IT guys need this approach because is simpler to distribute the servers load). I not very friendly with subdomains and big changes like this always can produce some problem (although the SEO migration would be ok, problems could appear, like ranking drops), But, the solution (the reasons are technical stuff), requires the mix of directories and subdomains in each product, leaving the structured in this way: Main country home (www.mysite.com.tld) o Product_1 Home (www.mysite.com.tld/product1/) § Product_1 articles product1.mysite.com.tld/product1_art1 product1.mysite.com.tld/product1_art2 product1.mysite.com.tld/product1_artx o Product_2 Home (www.mysite.com.tld/product2/) § Product_2 articles product2.mysite.com.tld/product1_art1 product2.mysite.com.tld/product1_art2 product2.mysite.com.tld/product1_artx So, the product home will be in a directory buy the pages of the articles of this product will be in a subdomain. What do you think about this solution? Beyond that the SEO migration would be fine, 301s, etc, can bring us difficulties in the rankings or the change can be done without any consideration? Thanks very much! Agustin
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOTeamDespegar0 -
Followup question to rand(om) question: Would two different versions (mobile/desktop) on the same URL work well from an SEO perspective and provide a better overall end-user experience?
We read today's rand(om) question on responsive design. This is a topic we have been thinking about and ultimately landing on a different solution. Our opinion is the best user experience is two version (desktop and mobile) that live on one URL. For example, a non-mobile visitor that visits http://www.tripadvisor.com/ will see the desktop (non-responsive) version. However, if a mobile visitor (i.e. iOS) visits the same URL they will see a mobile version of the site, but it is still on the same URL There is not a separate subdomain or URL - instead the page dynamically changes based on the end user's user agent. It looks like they are accomplishing this by using javascript to change the physical layout of the page to match the user's device. This is what we are considering doing for our site. It seems this would simultaneously solve the problems mentioned in the rand(om) question and provide an even better user experience. By using this method, we can create a truly mobile version of the website that is similar to an app. Unfortunately, mobile versions and desktop users have very different expectations and behaviors while interacting with a webpage. I'm interested to hear the negative side of developing two versions of the site and using javascript to serve the "right" version on the same URL. Thanks for your time!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | davidangotti0 -
How Long Before a URL is 'Too Long'
Hello Mozzers, Two of the sites I manage are currently in the process of merging into one site and as a result, many of the URLs are changing. Nevertheless (and I've shared this with my team), I was under the impression that after a certain point, Google starts to discount the validity of URLs that are too long. With that, if I were to have a URL that was structured as follows, would that be considered 'too long' if I'm trying to get the content indexed highly within Google? Here's an example: yourdomain.com/content/content-directory/article and in some cases, it can go as deep as: yourdomain.com/content/content-directory/organization/article. Albeit there is no current way for me to shorten these URLs is there anything I can do to make sure the content residing on a similar path is still eligible to rank highly on Google? How would I go about achieving this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NiallSmith0