Multilingual Structure
-
Hello fellow SEO fans, I've got a setup that I'm interested in some opinions on.
I have a website which has the following setup:
www.site.com (english version of the site)
www.site.com/nl (dutch version of the site)
Now, my experience tells me the dutch version would be written in dutch (not using Google Translate) and the meta data et al should also be in dutch. But my question is:
If somebody in, say, Netherlands perform a search in english for a specific keyword, we would want the www.site.com page to appear in the SERPs, not the www.site.com/nl page, because the person has searched in english. However, because there's a www.site.com/nl page, purely the /nl page will be optimized and linked to in order to rank it higher in the SERPs for dutch searches and not english searches? But if that's the case, then the person in the Netherlands searching for the english version of the keyword, probably won't see www.site.com in the ranks because of targeting and keyword distribution?
Bit of a tricky situation that I've been pondering over and can't quite put the nail on the head.
Any assistance would be appreciated.
-
@Gianluca - Thank you very much for stepping in here, I know you're a busy man so this is appreciated. What you've suggested is definitely an option and I'll investigate that approach when I'm back in the office. Thank you kindly.
-
In your case I would use the hreflang mark up like this:
That way you are saying to Google that whenever a search is realized in English (and independently of the country, because the code used is just the ISO language code), it must present the English home page URL.
Vice versa, if a search is done in flemish (independently of the location), it must present the Flemish home page.
This should be repeated for all the pages of the site.
-
Oh I'm sorry to hear there are problems already.
I thought that you are worrying about some possible problems in the future.
Maybe it's not very clear what the current problems are, mate, and maybe that's the reason there are no more answers with more specific information. Maybe you should be more specific about the current problems and not only about the ones which might or might not happen.
Cheers and still be happy, life is more than this.
-
Unfortunately over thinking is a requirement here because the site's not ranking as it should be, and I cannot just be happy until I've made a plan unfortunately.
I appreciate your response mate, I just need someone a little more technical to assist me.
-
Don't worry that much!
Just do it as you intend and be happy!
- if the english page is with english content and english (context & anchor) backlinks it will rank for english terms
- and same for the dutch page - there is no way 100% dutch (as content and backlinks) page to rank for english search terms.
My 2 cents.
Cheers
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
-
International SEO - Hreflang tags and URL Structure
Hello, I wonder if any SEO internationalisation experts can help. We are a UK centric business with a .com domain which all our traffic currently goes to. We have been growing in the US and are therefore looking to internationalise our website by building out some US pages using the subfolder .com/us. Since the keywords we wish to target in the US are different to the keywords we are targeting elsewhere, when implementing hreflang tags is it possible to use a different URL for the US page? So let’s say we are targeting ‘estate car’ generally but want to target ’station wagon’ as the keyword for the equivalent US page, can the URLs be different? Example: General page: www.example.com/estate-car US: www.example.com/us/station-wagon Hreflang tags: Would that be the correct implementation? Any help or guidance would be much appreciated!
Technical SEO | | SEOCT0 -
Keyword Phrase in URL structure
Wondered the best URL structure, to include a major keyword phrase. Our clients' case is that their domain name is not the main keyword. So should we include the keyword phrase in the URL structure to list all their office locations: A - www.website.com/anxiety-treatment/denver/1001
Technical SEO | | ErnieB
or
B - www.website.com/denver/1001 Would this be considered keyword stuffing? We'd like "A" above to rank for keyword phrases related to "anxiety treatment denver", etc.0 -
Moved a site and changed URL structures: Looking for help with pay
Hi Gents and Ladies Before I get started, here is the website in question. www.moldinspectiontesting.ca. I apologize in advance if I miss any important or necessary details. This might actually seem like several disjointed thoughts. It is very late where I am and I am a very exhausted. No on to this monster of a post. **The background story: ** My programmer and I recently moved the website from a standalone CMS to Wordpress. The owners of the site/company were having major issues with their old SEO/designer at the time. They felt very abused and taken by this person (which I agree they were - financially, emotionally and more). They wanted to wash their hands of the old SEO/designer completely. They sought someone out to do a minor redesign (the old site did look very dated) and transfer all of their copy as affordably as possible. We took the job on. I have my own strengths with SEO but on this one I am a little out of my element. Read on to find out what that is. **Here are some of the issues, what we did and a little more history: ** The old site had a terribly unclean URL structure as most of it was machine written. The owners would make changes to one central location/page and the old CMS would then generate hundreds of service area pages that used long, parameter heavy url's (along with duplicate content). We could not duplicate this URL structure during the transfer and went with a simple, clean structure. Here is an example of how we modified the url's... Old: http://www.moldinspectiontesting.ca/service_area/index.cfm?for=Greater Toronto Area New: http://www.moldinspectiontesting.ca/toronto My programmer took to writing 301 redirects and URL rewrites (.htaccess) for all their service area pages (which tally in the hundreds). As I hinted to above, the site also suffers from a overwhelming amount of duplicate copy which we are very slowly modifying so that it becomes unique. It's also currently suffering from a tremendous amount of keyword cannibalization. This is also a result of the old SEO's work which we had to transfer without fixing first (hosting renewal deadline with the old SEO/designer forced us to get the site up and running in a very very short window). We are currently working on both of these issues now. SERPs have been swinging violently since the transfer and understandably so. Changes have cause and effect. I am bit perplexed though. Pages are indexed one day and ranking very well locally and then apparently de-indexed the next. It might be worth noting that they had some de-index problems in the months prior to meeting us. I suspect this was in large part to the duplicate copy. The ranking pages (on a url basis) are also changing up. We will see a clean url rank and then drop one week and then an unclean version rank and drop off the next (for the same city, same web search). Sometimes they rank along side each other. The terms they want to rank for are very easy to rank on because they are so geographically targeted. The competition is slim in many cases. This time last year, they were having one of the best years in the company's 20+ year history (prior to being de-indexed). **On to the questions: ** **What should we do to reduce the loss in these ranked pages? With the actions we took, can I expect the old unclean url's to drop off over time and the clean url's to pick up the ranks? Where would you start in helping this site? Is there anything obvious we have missed? I planned on starting with new keyword research to diversify what they rank on and then following that up with fresh copy across the board. ** If you are well versed with this type of problem/situation (url changes, index/de-index status, analyzing these things etc), I would love to pick your brain or even bring you on board to work with us (paid).
Technical SEO | | mattylac0 -
Basic URL Structure Question
Hi, Putting together a URL for a product we are selling. We sell IT Training courses and the structure is normally Top Folder=Main Courses section Sub Folder=Vendor Page Specific=Course Name + Term An example is courses/microsoft/mcse-training However I have a product where the vendor and course name are the same. How should I best organise the URL - double mention or single mention So a) courses/togaf/togaf-foundation-training or b) courses/togaf/foundation-training
Technical SEO | | RobertChapman0 -
Webmaster woes - should I re-direct or re-structure?
Hey guys, I'll get straight to the point - a small (growing) website I'm working on has a number links pointing to it from totally irrelevant sites (66, to be precise). These were built by an SEO company prior to me working on the site, and lead to an over-optimisation penalty for one keyword. This number doesn't sound large, but proportionally (to all other links), it is. It didn't used to be, but a lot of the links coming in have now 'died', and the domains they came from are now just parked. Anyway, I have managed to contact pretty much all the webmasters, and 27 of these links have been removed. Unfortunately - as I'm sure many people know all too well - a good handful of the contacted webmasters haven't replied, and the bad links still remain on their websites (either in-content or on links pages). I have decided to 'refresh' the website with some new (and better) content - providing much more information and a valuable resource. My question is - what should I do? Should I just replace the content on the existing pages (slightly altering the URL structure to match the topic more) and 301 the old URLs to the new ones? Or should I delete the pages and create new ones - thus making sure this particular section of the site isn't affected by any bad in-bound links? I'm more inclined to opt for the latter option, and 'start fresh' with the pages - so I know I've got total control over them, but wanted to get the opinion of the community before I made a decision. Thanks in advance for your responses! Nick
Technical SEO | | Danapollo0 -
Link Structure & Duplicate Content
I am struggling with how I should handle the link structure on my site. Right now most of my pages are like this: Home -> Department -> Service Groups -> Content Page For Example: Home -> IT Solutions -> IT Support & Managed Services -> IT Support Home -> IT Solutions -> IT Support & Managed Services -> Managed Services Home -> IT Solutions -> IT Support & Managed Services -> Help Desk Services Home -> IT Solutions -> Virtualization & Data Center Solutions -> Virtualization Home -> IT Solutions -> Virtualization & Data Center Solutions -> Data Center Solutions This structure lines up with our business and makes logical sense but I am not sure how to handle the department and service group pages. Right now you can click them and it just brings you to a page with a small snippet for the links below. The real content is on the content pages. What I am worried about is that the snippets on those pages are just a paragraph or two of the content that's on the content page. Will this hurt me and get considered duplicate content? What is the best practice for dealing with this? Those department/service group pages have some good content on them but it's just parts of other pages. Am I okay doing this because there are not direct duplicates of other pages just parts of a few pages? Any help on this would be great. Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | ZiaTG0 -
URL Structure Question
Hey folks, I have a weird problem and currently no idea how to fix it. We have a lot of pages showing up as duplicates although they are the same page, the only difference is the url structure. They seem to show up like: http://www.example.com/page/ and http://www.example.com/page What would I need to do to force the URLs into one format or the other to avoid having that one page counting as two? The same issue pops up with upper and lower case: http://www.example.com/Page and http://www.example.com/page Is there any solution to this or would I need to forward them with 301s or similar? Thanks, Mike
Technical SEO | | Malarowski0 -
I changed the domain and structure of my site,is there anything I can do to help speed the recovery in SERPs?
I change the domain of my site in March (pretty much exactly when Panda hit, by coincidence). Our search traffic has dropped by 90% in that time with little recovery. In webmaster tools it shows about 400,000 pages on the new domain and about 85,000 still indexed on the old domain. I set up custom 301 redirects to all of the new pages on the new domain so everything that was moved has a good one hop redirect. I've been told that the only thing I can do is sit back and wait for everything to finish transitioning. The problem is that it has been 5 months of poor traffic, which means 5 months of slow sales. Is there anything I can do the speed up the transition?
Technical SEO | | iJeep0