Site structure for multi-lingual hotel website (subfolder names)
-
Hi there superMozers!
I´ve read a quite a few questions about multi-lingual sites but none answered my doubt / idea, so here it is:
I´m re-designing an old website for a hotel in 4 different languages which are all** hosted on the same .com domain** as follows: example.com/english/ for english example.com/espanol/ for **spanish ** example.com/francais/ for french example.com/portugues/ for portuguese While doing keyword search, I have noticed that many travel agencies separate geographical areas by folders, therefor an **agency pomoting beach hotels in South America **will have a structure as follows:
travelagency.com/argentina-beach-hotels/
travelagency.com/peru-beach-hotels/
and they list hotels in each folder, therefor benefiting from those keywords to rank ahead of many independent hotels sites from those areas.
What **I would like to **do -rather than just naming those folders with the traditional /en/ for english or /fr/ for french etc- is take advantage of this extra language subfolder to_´include´_ important keywords in the name of the subfolders in the following way (supposing the we have a beach hotel in Argentina):
example.com/argentina-beach-hotel/ for english
example.com/hotel-playa-argentina/ for **spanish **
example.com/hotel-plage-argentine/ for french
example.com/hotel-praia-argentina/ for portuguese
Note that the same keywords are used in the name of the folder, but translated into the language the subfolders are.
In order to make things clear for the search engines I would specify the language in the html for each page.
My doubt is whether google or other search engines may consider this as ´stuffing´ although most travel agencies do it in their site structure.
Any Mozers have experience with this, any idea on how search engines may react, or if they could penalise the site?
Thanks in advance!
-
Thanks for the article Keri, very refreshing and interesting regarding GA, much appreciated!
-
Don't forget to think about how your boss might react when asked for how many visits all of your pages in French got for the past 60 days. With the /francais/ in the URL, it's a snap. Other structures it might be a little more challenging. It's something to at least think about ahead of time.
Lunametrics has a great article on designing a Google Analytics friendly site at http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2010/09/22/designing-google-analytics-friendly-site/.
-
Thanks a lot Ryan, I appreciate the fast and detailed answer! Will go ahead with your recommendations!
-
My doubt is whether google or other search engines may consider this as ´stuffing´
Your approach is definitely not considered key word stuffing. Search engines will be absolutely fine with it and they would not penalize your site.
When creating a new physical folder structure, try to plan your server out as if it will last 20 years. The ideal folder structure wont change because you switched from html to xhtml, nor because Joe left your company, nor because your company decided to support another language. Your structure requires careful planning and thought.
Also remember your physical folder structure does not need to match your virtual folder structure. Your server can show a path such as /en/hotels but you can create a route to offer those files by navigating to /argentina-beach-hotels.
Your are offering your users a clear, readable folder structure. There is nothing black hat nor bad about that in any way.
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
-
Good day team.. have problem with my website i lost all ranking and lost 10x times traffic in 1 day without reason...
Good day everybody. My website is www.evilrpm.com and ii have drop in rank and traffic in 1 day without reason... still fighting with that issue .. from that moment i starts to get the errors and in search console if i make testing pages .. after test they can show like warning or error page but in console its green.. i was check everything, and i think that problem in server.. because it happened when i write the truth about my experience with Shopify... this is extraordinary organization i feel like they from the starts was don't give me the way to grow... any idea what the problem? thanks for your support!
International SEO | | EvilTIGER0 -
What are the SEO implications of having a website hosted in Singapore (as a subdomain of the global website) when the website is targeting the UK audience?
What are the SEO implications of having a website hosted in Singapore (as a subdomain of the global website) when the website is targeting the UK audience? Will it be hard to get it to rank? Will there be problems with search console?
International SEO | | ToniFarrington-Allthingsweb0 -
International SEO Sub folder Structure
Hi Could anyone offer some advice on the best way to structure sub folders on a website that we are launching worldwide. We are a UK based business and currently run a UK site on www.website.com and we are planning on launching into Europe using a sub folder structure. We will use /de, /fr, /es for the new countries that are coming on board but the question is should the UK site url be: www.website.com or www.website.com/uk As have an established web presence in the UK I'm thinking it should remain as www.wewbsite.com but are there any advantages / disadvantages to changing it to .com/uk Many Thanks
International SEO | | SmiffysUK0 -
How to best set up international XML site map?
Hi everyone, I've been searching about a problem, but haven't been able to find an answer. We would like to generate a XML site map for an international web shop. This shop has one domain for Dutch visitors (.nl) and another domain for visitors of other countries (Germany, France, Belgium etc.) (.com). The website on the 2 domains looks the same, has the same template and same pages, but as it is targeted to other countries, the pages are in different languages and the urls are also in different languages (see example below for a category bags). Example Netherlands:
International SEO | | DocdataCommerce
Dutch domain: www.client.nl
Example Dutch bags category page: www.client.nl/tassen Example France:
International domain: www.client.com
Example French bags category page: www.client.com/sacs When a visitor is on the Dutch domain (.nl) which shows the Dutch content, he can switch country to for example France in the country switch and then gets redirected to the other, international .com domain. Also the other way round. Now we want to generate a XML sitemap for these 2 domains. As it is the same site, but on 2 domains, development wants to make 1 sitemap, where we take the Dutch version with Dutch domain as basis and in the alternates we specify the other language versions on the other domain (see example below). <loc>http://www.client.nl/tassen</loc>
<xhtml:link<br>rel="alternate"
hreflang="fr"
href="http://www.client.com/sacs"
/></xhtml:link<br> Is this the best way to do this? Or would we need to make 2 site maps, as it are 2 domains?0 -
Multinational website - best practice
Hello, I am researching a lot on this subject and have read several articles here on Moz and elsewhere about the best practices for multinational websites. But I'm not yet convinced on what would be the best solution in my case. Today we have the following websites (examples):
International SEO | | WebGain
website.com which function as a global website.
website.dk which is for the danish market
website.no which is for the norwegian market Some of the content on these websites are the same (but different languages; english, danish and norwegian). We want to expand the business to more countries and work with ccTLDs. Both to countries which speaks languages that we don't have content for yet (an example could be Poland), but also more countries that speaks english, like Great Britain (with a .co.uk domain) and Australia (with a .com.au domain). We expect to expand in many countries (as many as it makes sense to do). I have read a lot about the alternative hreflang tag which would look like and that seems like a good solution, but I have a couple of questions that I hope you guys can answer: Should the alternate hreflang tags show every existing language versions including the one you're on or only show the alternative versions? Do we risk penalty by having identical or almost identical content for same language websites (could be UK and the global .com one) if we use the alternate hreflang tags? I'm aware that we should use the native spellings and sentences in each country. Would the sitemap solution be better in our case? We have the same link structure for all websites, but the sub-directories can differ due to their language (like /articles/ is /artikler/ in danish) - is that an issue? Will hreflang="en" function as global english? (so searching users that we don't have a local website for will see that).0 -
Site Ranking in all countries except USA
Hello, I have a site www.apdermatology.com in is ranking #1 for
International SEO | | element8design
"Dermatologist Chelsea Mi" "Dermatologist Chelsea Michigan" In Google in Canada, UK, Australia, Etc.. But in the USA it is on the 4th+ Page, it has been this way for weeks if not months. And does not seem to come up. I originally thought maybe that google was penalizing the site although, it comes up in all other counties. Does anyone have any recommendations how to resolve this, or what the problem may be? Thanks.0 -
3 month old site lost almost complete traffic overnight
Hi All, I started a Indian coupon and deal site http://www.couponspy.in/ around 3 month ago and traffic increased almost daily. But yesterday my site lost almost all of its traffic. Keywords which ranked 1-5 lost around 4-15 places and keywords which ranked 6-20 lost ca. 20-50 places. The Moz Crawl Diagnostics doesn't indicate any mayor issues. Has there been a Google Panda update in India? Reasons why my site has been affected? Please help!!!! 😉 I have seen the same traffic decrease on other coupon start ups, eg https://www.cuponation.in/ and https://www.cuponation.in/ Did we all make the same mistake? Any guesses?
International SEO | | ParvatiSingh0 -
Multi-Country Hosting
Hi all
International SEO | | yousayjump
I have read a few post that are similar to mine on this forum but still wanted to ask my specific question. We have a .com domain hosted on a dedicated server in the UK for our main website which takes online bookings and payments. We have purchased the following TLD's of our domain name:
.it, .es, .ch, .fr, .es, .at We essentially want to create a satellite site on each domain where the idea is that users in those countries will find our satellite sites via organic search engine results when searching for the information we sell. Due to the nature of our infrastructure, each satellite site will connect to the mysql database on the UK site to drawn down its text content. This is where the main CMS is located. I understand the following are important from an SEO point of view for our satellite sites: Hosting in the country we wish to target
Geographical targeting via WMT
Local addresses and telephone numbers on the site
Correct lang=" " tag in the source code
Content presented in the correct language (goes without saying really) Can you advise on any other considerations? Many Thanks Kris0