Multilingual site making new URLs, how to preserve SEO juice?

[innovacy]

Hello!

My site currently serves content in german and english, however without having separate URLs (it depends on Accept-Language and has a submitform for changing language based on set cookies).

The site appears extremely well in the search engine, with many keywords ranking at #1-10. They appear on the german and english google search, with the first one bringing the best results. It's however the english site that appears in the results.

I want to change to a better approach by having subdirectories for each language, as I'm extending the site, I know how to do this but I have found -nowhere- any infos on how to preserve my search engine ranks? If I keep the english version as homepage and send german visitors to /de/, might this kill my position in the german search engine which is very important, as the new frontpage under /de/ would become more relevant and the english one maybe less?

Or should I keep the german version the default one and send english visitors elsewhere? What happens with my search positions, if I have no side on the / but visitors are always send to either /en/ or /de/?

Every help is greatly appreciated, as I found a lot of articles everywhere on how to make a multilingual site, but nowhere anything on how it affects current search results.

[innovacy]

Well yes, I know, I wouldn't have done it myself this way for many more reasons, but that's how I acquired the site and now I'm going through fixing and optimizing things. Amazingly is, that my tiny optimizations had already a huge impact on visitor stream, especially with users noticing them Alone bringing the Pagespeed from like 60% to >90% did increase user activity as also search results already by a 20-30% and revenue by 50% in less than 2 weeks! I can only suggest anyone to make a site speedy! Anyway... back to topic!

Well, in the case I would not have a page under /, I would of course had choicen either /de/ or /en/ to redirect to with 301 or 302, when visitors would have reached the home page.

But the more I think about it and after the thoughts I had previously on my post to Jane (which hers was also a great help, same as yours!) I think the best results might be really achieved by keeping the homepage as it is.
Just not sure yet, if I should add to the home page a x-default hreflang attribute or maybe none at all? Or maybe one for each language?

I thought even about doing a small test maybe first with other pages under the domain and protocol the results, before going after the home page, which is the one bringing in nearly all traffic.

Well, things seem now a lot more clear of what to do and what to avoid and I believe I can figure out a way now to make it work

Thanks everyone!

[kwoolf]

Hi Dimitrios,

Sorry for the confusion. There is in fact a safe way to go about this. Since your site is currently showing two different pages on the same URL (big no-no according to Matt https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyWx31GeQWY), you can do any of the three with the following consequences:

Keep the default domain as the English language as it's been indexed by search engines as of now, and then add a /de/ subfolder for your German visitors. You won't lose any rank in the short term since you're not changing anything that search engines already see, your just adding pages. But as your 70% German users trend toward the /de/, these pages should out rank the default domain in time.

On language switch, your visitors are redirected to the homepage from any other page, so your site wouldn't take that big of a hit by keeping the default domain home page and adding two subfolders /en/ and /de/. In this case, the homepage could be either language, but since the English page has been indexed already, this would be the safest way to go for the default domain. If you're goal is to rank the German site higher under the current conditions, don't worry about the hit. Do what's best for your visitors and make German the default language.

And lastly you could cater to your German visitors by making the default domain German and adding an /en/ subfolder for English. Again, here your site has already been indexed in English and only English, so I imagine you'd take a hit in the short term as the search engines reindex, then you'd recover in time assuming your keywords are in German.

One more option I just realized you were considering was redirecting visitors to either a /en/ or /de/ without a default domain home page. Since this is the page showing on SERP results, it would be a bad idea to remove that page.

Just so you're aware, your English site shows in the German results only because it's the only site Google can see. As far as I can tell, there are no URL parameters to indicate to any search engine which version is English and which is German. Once you fix that, you might actually rank higher.

Hope I got your question right this time. I'll just add here that I run a multilingual e-commerce site in Taiwan with Chinese and English. I set the default domain to show Chinese and added an /en/ subfolder for English. Over 75% of my Chinese keywords rank #1-3 while only 20% of my English keywords rank #1-10.

[innovacy]

What isn't fully clear yet: If I move the german version under /de/ and signalize the / is english and not for german audiences anymore, as now /de/ is for them, would /de/ rank like they would be new sites without pagerank (and probable /de/ as also / lose their ranks in german search) or would they acquire similar pagerank like /, since it's just another version pointed to? I have to add, in this very specific case many keywords are the same in both languages.

While reading an article here, another thought came. What if I kept the site on / by doing one of this:

1. Either signalize to Google, it's for international audiences (which I guess would be no different than now) with the default attribute and refer to no language-specific versions for Google. Users would receive a message on the site to get to a german version, but for which Google would have no reference there's another URL for / having the content in this language.

2. Or add hreflang tags for english as also the german language for the URL at / - so Google would think this site is suitable for both audiences and as a result might keep it unmodified in the US and german search as it is now. I guess it's possible to assign more than one language to one URL?

This would be only for the homepage, all other pages would receive separate URLs. Would that be a solution to keep Google from de-ranking accidentally the homepage from the german search? Or I'm doing a mistake in my thinking here?

[JaneCopland]

Unfortunately, there is no 100% safe way to do this without the risk of losing either some rankings or traffic, but this was what the hreflang tag was created to help mitigate.

Would it recognize it's the same it knew, just in another language when using the hreflang and would just display the german language now in the german results without mainly affecting the rank?

This is certainly what should happen. Say you move the English version to /en/ and keep the German version on the original URLs (which Google currently sees as being in English), you'd use the hreflang tag on the German content, with the tag pointing to the /en/ subfolder to say "the English language stuff you're used to seeing is over here now." Are you comfortable targeting the English language to one particular country or would you prefer to keep it as non-specific English content?

If you do it the other way around, moving the German content to /de/, you'd still place the hreflang tag on the default URLs (which in this case, would be in English), and Google should rank the new URLs in Germany because it is being told that those URLs are for German audiences.

None of this is a certainty though - the hreflang tag seems to work really well on newly developed content and I am sure Google can make it work in this case, but I don't have any case studies or anecdotes that involve a similar scenario.

[innovacy]

Well, the german one is more important and ranks for 70% of the traffic. So this is the important one to keep. However, it's not the german version that Google ranks so well in the german search, but the english version as this is the version it has indexed.

So, which do I keep in this case for Google as the default language?

Would that cause maybe Google to drop large parts of the 70% traffic if suddenly it sees completely different content (remember it's the english it sees) or would it recognize it's the same it knew, just in another language when using the hreflang and would just display the german language now in the german results without mainly affecting the rank?

The site ranks extremely well on many important Top 1-5 keywords, so it's really critical to keep that....

[innovacy]

Hi Kevin!

The problem isn't how to realize the technical details. I know those in the best detail as I'm a longtime webdeveloper.

The question is really around, which language to keep where or to move maybe both to separate URLs. Right now no language has an unique URL, they share the same.

Google indexes the english language, however the site ranks best in the german Google search. So here is the real dilemma: if I switch to the german as default, even though that's 70% of the visitors, I'm completely changing what Google sees. If I keep english, I wonder, if that will be worse to make the site rank better in google.com, since it's seen more relevant for the german search despite english indexed content.

Or do I move every site on it's own URL, even the frontpage like http://feldzug.net/de and http://feldzug.net/en  and no page under http://feldzug.net directly (would redirect). But stil the question remains, with the special situation described above, which would be the default redirect, or would it not matter in this case?

[ZephSnapp]

Hi Dimitrios,

The first question is which of the two languages is the most important to you?  That is the one you should prioritize and give the other language the subfolder.  The next question is are the English pages intended for the same country, but in a different language?  if this is the case, then you should also add the hreflang attribute so that Google knows which pages should be served to what type of users.

If you have follow up questions about hreflang application, here are a few resources for you:

http://moz.com/blog/hreflang-behaviour-insights

http://moz.com/blog/using-the-correct-hreflang-tag-a-new-generator-tool

[kwoolf]

Hi Dimitrios,

Changing your URL structure will always have an affect on ranking, but you can take steps to minimize the damage. You'll be able to solve your biggest problem with server redirects for URLs containing the old language parameters. You'll need to add these redirects to your Apache .htaccess or Nginx .conf file.

One issue you might run into is an outrageous number of URLs generated by the links from one language to the other, depending on the e-commerce platform. I've seen Google index tens of thousands of pages on some e-commerce platforms with parameters and multiple links to language subdirectories, category pages, product pages, reviews, currency selections, cross-sell and up-selling modules, etc. Best to get really familiar with your e-commerce platform before making this switch.

Make sure to set your content language in your HTML and follow all other best practices. I've gone through several e-commerce site rebranding and domain migrations, and I've seen the slowest sites recover within a few weeks.

Good luck!