What is the best CMS Approach for Multilingual Versions of Site?
-
We have expanded into France and Brazil and now have a someone in-house that can translate to French and Brazilian Portuguese. I own ".fr" and ".com.br" versions of our domain. We are using Wordpress for our CMS. We are currently publishing about 2 articles a week on English site which we would be translating and publishing through new international sites (when appropriate). We will be changing out photos and videos at times in addition to all the text/copy.
So, before I jump deep into this I wanted to reach out for help regarding the best modern approach to this. Should I use some sort of WP Plugin that will let me manage each of these through 1 WP install or is it better to run each separately through multiple WP installs?
I want to achieve this while...
- avoiding any duplicate content penalties.
- provide easy admin/editor management of publishing content.
Any help/advice is greatly appreciated. Thanks!
-
Seems like the safe solution would be to go with separate sites and localize hosting for each as you mentioned.
I just discovered Multilingual Press WP plugin (https://wordpress.org/plugins/multilingual-press/). Looks like it can provide ccTld and ability to manage all through a single WP Site with Pro version. I would lose the potential SEO benefit from local hosting, but efficient management might beat that. Need to dig into this a bit more.
Also, WordPress Multilingual plugin (http://wpml.org) was recommended to me for "folders" or "sub-domain" solutions. I need to dig into this more, but I do feel better about using ccTld for each.
Thanks for all the help and resources!
-
Wow that is an interesting work around! Thanks for sharing!
-
In my experience, the best way to do this would be to set up the .fr domain separately as it's own separate WordPress installation, and have it hosted at a hosting company with a presence in France.
However, what's best for SEO sometimes creates more work for administering a site, vs. having it all available from one login in one WordPress instance.
As far as using a .fr domain, there are many schools of thought on this.
This Moz blog goes into the top strategies:
http://moz.com/blog/international-seo-dropping-the-information-dustAmazon uses ccTld (Country Code, Top Level Domains). For example, Amazon.com, Amazon.de, Amazon.fr, etc.
Apple uses a subdomain / sub-carpet strategy: (i.e. store.apple.com/es)
In my past experience building out eCommerce and other stores, if you host locally, and use different ccTld (i.e. domain.fr), you won't have to worry about the duplicate content issue, as Google and other search engines will see this as it's own site, especially if it's translated (well) into another language.
Here's more on International SEO best practices:
http://moz.com/learn/seo/international-seoI hope this helps!
-- Jeff -
I recently had to solve the same issue. I don't know if my approach is the best one, but I will describe it.
- I use tags to set the post language, "lang=EN" is the tag for english post, "lang=IT" is the tag for the italian post, etc...
- I wrote a 20 lines WP plugin to add a custom panel in the post edit page, the custom panel show a list of input fields, one input field for each enabled language (in my case were EN+IT+DE), for the language of the post the input field is prefilled with the slug of the post and read only, for the other languages the input field is manually filled with the slug of the corresponding post in the other language. I didn't make those fields mandatory, but you can choose to do so with 1 line of code.
- The language switcher just redirect to it.domain.com or de.domain.com or domain.com.
- You can edit (again just few lines of code) the WP template you use to filter the blog roll according to the selected language, showing all post tagged with that language plus all post without any language tag (that's an arbitrary decision, in your case maybe you want to filter those out, yes not filtering them out you incur in content duplication).
At the end was just few lines of code, and I could even do it myself (I am far from a PHP coder).
In my case I didn't edit the WP template because I am using a different rendering engine, but that doesn't mean much.
I would not use different WP installation, it makes editing cumbersome.
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
-
Keyword Tool Best Practices
VERY much a newbie with MOZ Pro (10 days into my 30-day trial), so for that, I apologize. I just want to get an idea of the time needed to accumulate data for keywords, and if I am doing all this right. I'm guessing this...use the tool and enter as many keyword possibilities as I can come up with for my website. Then wait a week or so. Then make a keyword decision. Is this the recommended or best practice? If it makes a difference, my website pertains to a local onsite service that I provide. Any web traffic more than 50 miles of my physical location would be a waste. My 1 on 1 session with Seun was great, but now I need to put it all together and make some traffic happen! Any other ideas, please throw them my way. If I'm completely off-base with this, feel free to send insults!
Local Website Optimization | | NewSEOguy0 -
International Sites
Hi Guys Just wanting to get some feedback on best practices for international website. The main website is a .co.uk there looking to target France & Belgium. The web hosting is UK based. Do we replicate the UK site and translate to local language but use a .fr domain and have 3 versions of the websites on 3 separate domains? or do just use the co.uk with french & Belgium translation have pages related to those countries? Any assistance will be appreciated
Local Website Optimization | | Cocoonfxmedia0 -
How to create sites with powerful individual pages to achieve top results.
How to create sites with powerful individual pages to achieve top results . According to MOZ I need to have powerful individual pages to achieve top results my site has a 0 authority so for this reason I need to focus on powerful pages but how do I know if my pages are powerful or not.
Local Website Optimization | | A.V.S0 -
What is the best way for a UK company to source SEO Support to boost SERPS in USA Google?
We are a niche web retailer with a world leading product and as such are probably the best option for USA customers (even though we are based in the UK) up to 18 months ago google agreed and placed us high for USA searches and we had good business as a result however since penguin (or around that time anyways) google increased our SERPS for more local markets (UK and EUROPE) and decreased our ranks for USA with a consequent reduction in our USA sales We want to improve rank again in USA (and Canada and Australia and Russia) but need specialist help What's the best way to source that? (short of someone saying they know exactly how to do that) ant recommendation most gratefully received Tom
Local Website Optimization | | tomnivore0 -
How to target a site to only specific US states?
Hey Guys, Does anyone have experience or can point me to the right documentation about geo targeting possibilities for specific states in the US or specific areas in the world. Local SEO does not apply in my case, since my website is not a business nor have a physical address. My website offers information that is only relevant for specific states in the US, how can I leverage my I optimisation to gain more exposure in those specific states? I really appreciate any help. A
Local Website Optimization | | Mr.bfz0 -
Why a site just dropped out of ranks
I have a site i am working on link It was ranking fairly well and then I added content to the homepage to better optimize it for the keywords it was already ranking for. Ever since I did that the entire site is no longer ranking well. Thoughts?
Local Website Optimization | | Atomicx0 -
What's the best way to add phrase keywords to the URL?
Hi, Our keywords are all our service + a list of towns (for example, "carpet cleaning St. Louis"). The issue I'm having is that one particular site could be targeting "carpet cleaning St. Louis", "carpet cleaning Manchester", "carpet cleaning Ballwin", "carpet cleaning Kirkwood", etc. etc. etc... up to maybe 15 different towns. Is there a way to effectively add these keywords into the URL without making it look spammy? I'm having the same issue with adding the exact keywords to the page title, img alt tag, etc. Thanks for any advice/input!
Local Website Optimization | | nataliefwc0 -
How do I fix duplicate content issues if the pages are really just localized versions?
Does this still hurt our SEO? Should we place different countries on their own respective domains (.co.uk, etc)?
Local Website Optimization | | fdmgroup0