Multilingual Sitemap with some non-matching URLs
-
The website has two languages, English (.com/en-int/) and French (.com/fr-fr/).
Some pages only exist in French, and some only in English, but there are many that are a 1-to-1 match. So, my questions is, in the multilingual sitemap, should I only include the URLs that are alternates, and then create a 2nd sitemap for all non-matching URLs?
Or should I have 3 sitemaps: 1) Multilingual sitemap for all matching URLs (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/26208650 , 2) English sitemap for only URLs not included in multilingual sitemap, 3) French sitemap for only URLs not included in multilingual sitemap. And then create a sitemap index file to link to all 3 sitemaps.
-
Thanks for your response Oleg. But if I separate matching URLs into different sitemaps, then doesn't that go against what Google recommends by including them in 1 multilingual sitemap?
-
you should have 1 sitemap index and 2 sitemaps.. 1 for English and 1 for French, and the index that links to them both.
If a page has an equivalent, include the rel="alternate" meta data. If not, don't include any meta data (just do the generic ones = loc, freq, priority)
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
-
Problem to get multilingual posts indexed on Google
Last year on June I decided to make my site multi-lingual. The domain is: https://www.dailyblogprofits.com/ The main language English and I added Portuguese and a few posts on Spanish. What happened since then? I started losing traffic from Google and posts on Portuguese are not being indexed. I use WPML plugin to make it multi-lingual and I had Yoast installed. This week I uninstalled Yoast and when I type on google "site:site:dailyblogprofits.com/pt-br" I started seeing Google indexing images, but still not the missing posts. I have around 145 posts on Portuguese, but on Search Console it show only 57 hreflang tags. Any idea what is the problem? I'm willing to pay for an SEO Expert to resolve this problem to me.
International SEO | | Cleber0090 -
International SEO setup issues canonical URL
My site is www.grocare.com for one region and in.grocare.com for another region. Both of them have the same content except the currency for particular regions. Someone told me that google will take the content as duplicate and not rank either. I have setup hreflang and targeted different regions for both in the search console. I read many article which say canonical urls need to be setup for international seo sites. But Im not sure how to setup canonical urls and whether they are the right way to go . i just don't want my content deranked. Now i have setup hreflang properly after asking the moz community itself. So im hoping to get some help with this query too. TIA
International SEO | | grocare0 -
Is it advisable to show additionally also English ciity names of American cities in website versions of non-western languages such as Chinese, Japanese etc?
To my understanding in many Asian languages city names are transcribed as they sound and this can cause confusion especially in the case of lesser known American city names. So I was planning to put in our international website versions (Chinese, Japanese, Korean etc. ) the English name in brackets after the translated city name in meta title and H1.
International SEO | | lcourse
However when I checked Tripadvisor and Booking.com I noticed that they do not show the English city name anywhere on their Asian language versions. Any thoughts?
Would you recommend to put the English city name in brackets after the translated city name or may it rather hurt our ranking and traffic?0 -
What strategy is better for a multilingual site for the SEO point of view?
Hi everyone, in a case for a site with two languages like spanish and english, how would do you deal with it? I can see 4 cases, which is better?? 1. With differents domains: mydomain.es (for spanish version) and mydomain.com (for english version). 2. With subfolder mydomain.com/es/ and mydomain.com/en/ 3. With Subdomain: es.mydomain.com and en.mydomain.com 4 With URL translation (any url is translated in ther languages but not use of subdomain or subfolder): mydominain.com/hola and mydomiain.com/hello Thanks very much for your answers (i love this forum). 🙂
International SEO | | webtematica0 -
Auto-Redirecting Homepage on Multilingual Site
The website has an auto-redirecting homepage on a multilingual site. Here is some background: User visits the site for first time > sent to javascript age verification page with country of origin selector. If selects "France" then served French page (.com/fr-fr/). If selects any other country, then served English page (.com/en-int/). A cookie is set, and next time the user visits the site, they are automatically served the appropriate language URL. 1st Question: .com/ essentially does not exist. It is being redirected to .com/en-int/ as this is the default page. Should this be a 301 redirect since I want this to serve as the new homepage? 2nd Question:. In the multilingual sitemap, should I still set .com/ as the hreflang="x-default" even though the user is automatically redirected to a language directory? According to Google, as just released here: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2014/05/creating-right-homepage-for-your.html "automatically serve the appropriate HTML content to your users depending on their location and language settings. You will either do that by using server-side 302 redirects or by dynamically serving the right HTML content. Remember to use x-default rel-alternate-hreflang annotation on the homepage / generic page even if the latter is a redirect page that is not accessible directly for users." So, this is where I am not clear. If use a 302 redirect of .com/ to either .com/en-int/ or .com/fr-fr/, won't I then lose the inbound link value and DA/PA of .com/ if I just use a 302? Note: there is no .com/ at this moment. Any advice is appreciated. Thanks,Alex
International SEO | | Alex.Weintraub0 -
Thai Characters in URL's
Does anyone have experience with non-Latin characters in URL's? We've launched a website in Thailand and picked Thai characters for URL's. However, when you copy it, it turns into something like this: http://www.imoneythailand.com/บัตรเครดิต Can it impact our website's crawlability? Also, is keyword in URL a ranking factor for non-Latin languages? Thanks in advance for help!
International SEO | | imoney0 -
What language to use for URL's for Russian language?
Hi, Our site is in English, Spanish, Danish and Russian - the URL's are individual to the language they are in, but of course, Russian contains some strange characters so I decided not to use them in the URL's Any advice on how to create the URL's for russian language pages? thanks
International SEO | | bjs20100 -
Backlinks to URLs with Language Parameters (for Chinese version of website) and SEO?
Hey all, We run a large eCommerce site in Australia and are preparing to launch to the Chinese market. Our site has been fully converted to Chinese and displays the version of the site detected as default in the user's browser unless they manually select otherwise. This is done by appending the parameter "?la=zh" onto the end of the URL, so for example the Chinese version would be: **www.example.com/australia?la=zh ** This then forces the product catalogue to display the relevant language version. My question is, for SEO purposes and back links in particular, since they aren't really a "true URL" (i.e: strictly speaking they aren't different "pages", just the same page being populated with different characters), would getting links from Chinese websites to the URL "www.example.com/australia?la=zh" really be viewed as any different from just "www.example.com/australia"? Do they pass the same amount of juice and is the difference detected by the engines (thinking mainly about Baidu in particular but of course Google as well)? Feedback from anyone with experience in SEO for multi-lingual sites would be much appreciated, thanks.
International SEO | | ExperienceOz0