Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Best practice for URL - Language/country
-
Hi,
We are planning on having our website localized into more languages. We already have an English and German version. The German version is currently a sub-domain:
www.example.com --> English version
de.example.com --> German version
Is this recommended? Or is it always better to have URLs with language prefixes such a:
Which is a better practice in terms of SEO?
-
Hi Peter,
Both really good answers to your questions above but maybe it would be good to give you some further pointing in the right direction. Perhaps you could answer the questions below and I can give you my personal opinion on which method would be best:
-
will you be putting an equal amount of marketing (content, PR, etc.) into the Spanish version for example compared with English?
-
are you able to offer fully localised service eg, Spanish customer service, Spanish sales team etc.?
-
is your company well-known globally?
It's important not to also forget that another option is using ccTLDs (eg, .co.uk, .com.au). These give the highest signal to search engines about the country being targeted and also importantly make you look more "local" which can do wonders for increasing conversion rate in countries where your company is not well-known.
-
-
I think that Tom gave you one of the best answers possible.
However I hope this helps your site structure should be very similar to one contained in the two URL's
If I may add a little bit of information that I thought was helpful
- https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en
- https://www.deepcrawl.com/knowledge/best-practice/hreflang-101-how-to-avoid-international-duplication/
WHERE TO ADD YOUR HREFLANG TAGS
You can add hreflang tags to your sitemaps, in the HTTP response headers, or on the page itself.
IN YOUR SITEMAPS
The best place to add hreflang is in your sitemap as including them in the headers or on the page adds weight to every single page request.
The following example will inform Google about the English version from the German version of the website:
<url> <loc>http://www.example.com/deutsch/</loc></url>
<xhtml:link< span=""> rel=”alternate” hreflang=”en” href=”http://www.example.com/english/” /> <xhtml:link < span="">rel=”alternate” hreflang=”de” href=”http://www.example.com/deutsch/” /></xhtml:link <></xhtml:link<>
This method would need to be repeated in full for every page on the site and for all the international websites.
IN YOUR HEADERS AND HTML
Hreflang tags can also be added to the HTTP header:
Link: http://www.example.com/english/; rel=”alternate”; hreflang=”en” Link: http://www.example.com/deutsch/; rel=”alternate”; hreflang=”de”
Or in the tag in the HTML:
http://www.example.com/english/” /> http://www.example.com/deutsch/
& because you will be creating a new site
https://www.candidsky.com/blog/the-seo-2015-guide-to-website-migration/
it would come down to your backlink profile if it were me I would use
Moz open site Explorer, Majestic, Ahrefs and Google Webmaster tools to determine whether or not I will be receiving a enough Backlinks for a subdomain or separate TLD otherwise I would use a subfolder and an extremely fast method of hosting the site Fastly is excellent or many other great methods as well.
Hope this helps,
Tom
PS use
http://hreflang.ninja/ to check
-
Hi Peter
Both are viable options.
I'd highly recommend going through Aleyda Solis' international SEO posts here on the Moz blog. They can teach how to prepare for international SEO, how to approach site structure and how to generate relevant code and hreflang tags.
Here is her international SEO checklist
Here is her Hreflang blog post and generator tool
And 40 tools to help advance your international SEO
They're great reading and nothing that I'd be able to do add to, so I hope this helps!
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
-
Same URL for languages sub-directories
Hi All, I have a main domain and 9 different subdirectories for languages, example: www.example.com/page.html www.example.com/uk/page-uk.html www.example.com/es/page-es.html we are implementing hreflang tags for the languages, but we are thinking to get rid of the dashes on the languages URL: -uk or -es, so it will be: www.example.com/page.html www.example.com/uk/page.html www.example.com/es/page.hrml would this be a problem? to have same page names even if they are in different subdirectories? would we need to add canonical tags, at lease for the main domain URLs? www.kornferry.com/page.html Thank you, Rachel
Technical SEO | | RaquelSaiz0 -
Topic Cluster: URL Best Practices
I'm trying to be mature and employ the Topic Cluster strategy to my content. In doing so I realized there are a few URL options. Some more difficult to execute than others. -Is it important to call out the Pillar Topic in your subtopic URL?
Technical SEO | | dkellyagile
-Does the Pillar Topic need to have its own landing page? (As opposed to just being part of the blog.) Here's an Example: My Pillar is: Inbound vs. Outbound
My subtopic is: Marketing Platforms Here are the URL options I can think of... Option 1: https://pipelineinbound.com/blog/inbound-vs-outbound-marketing-platforms/ Option 2: https://pipelineinbound.com/blog/which-marketing-platforms/ Option 3: https://pipelineinbound.com/blog/marketing-platforms-inbound-vs-outbound/ Option 4 (Hardest): https://pipelineinbound.com/inbound-vs-outbound/marketing-platforms/ Are there some fundamental best practices for URL structure and Link Building as it pertains to Topic Clusters? Thanks!0 -
What is SEO best practice to implement a site logo as an SVG?
What is SEO best practice to implement a site logo as an SVG?
Technical SEO | | twisme
Since it is possible to implement a description for SVGs it seems that it would be possible to use that for the site name. <desc>sitename</desc>
{{ STUFF }} There is also a title tag for SVGs. I’ve read in a thread from 2015 that sometimes it gets confused with the title tag in the header (at least by Moz crawler) which might cause trouble. What is state of the art here? Any experiences and/or case studies with using either method? <title>sitename</title>
{{ STUFF }} However, to me it seems either way that best practice in terms of search engines being able to crawl is to load the SVG and implement a proper alt tag: What is your opinion about this? Thanks in advance.1 -
Best practices for types of pages not to index
Trying to better understand best practices for when and when not use a content="noindex". Are there certain types of pages that we shouldn't want Google to index? Contact form pages, privacy policy pages, internal search pages, archive pages (using wordpress). Any thoughts would be appreciated.
Technical SEO | | RichHamilton_qcs0 -
What's the best way to handle product filter URLs?
I've been researching and can't find a clear cut answer. Imagine you have a product category page e.g. domain/jeans You've a lot of options as to how to filter the results domain/jeans?=ladies,skinny,pink,10 or domain/jeans/ladies-skinny-pink-10 or domain/jeans/ladies/skinny?=pink,10 And in this how do you handle titles, breadcrumbs etc. Is the a way you prefer to handle filters and why do you do it that way? I'm trying to make my mind up as some very big names handle this differently e.g. http://www.next.co.uk/shop/gender-women-category-jeans/colour-pink-fit-skinny-size-10r VS https://www.matalan.co.uk/womens/shop-by-category/jeans?utf8=✓&[facet_filter][meta.tertiary_category][Skinny]=on&[facet_filter][variants.meta.size][Size+10]=on&[facet_filter][meta.master_colour][Midwash]=on&[facet_filter][min_current_price][gte]=6.0&[facet_filter][min_current_price][lte]=18.0&per=36&sort=
Technical SEO | | RodneyRiley0 -
Why do some URLs for a specific client have "/index.shtml"?
Reviewing our client's URLs for a 301 redirect strategy, we have noticed that many URLs have "/index.shtml." The part we don'd understand is these URLs aren't the homepage and they have multiple folders followed by "/index.shtml" Does anyone happen to know why this may be occurring? Is there any SEO value in keeping the "/index.shtml" in the URL?
Technical SEO | | FranFerrara0 -
What is the best method to block a sub-domain, e.g. staging.domain.com/ from getting indexed?
Now that Google considers subdomains as part of the TLD I'm a little leery of testing robots.txt with something like: staging.domain.com
Technical SEO | | fthead9
User-agent: *
Disallow: / in fear it might get the www.domain.com blocked as well. Has anyone had any success using robots.txt to block sub-domains? I know I could add a meta robots tag to the staging.domain.com pages but that would require a lot more work.0 -
Double byte characters in the URL - best avoided?
We are doing some optimisation on sites in the APAC region, namely China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Japan. We have set the url generator to automatically use the heading of the page in the URL which works fine for countries using Latin characters, but is causing problems, particularly in IE, when it comes to the double byte countries. For some reason, IE struggles with double byte and displays URLs in their rather ugly, coded form. Anybody got any suggestions on whether we should persist with the keyword URLs or revert to the non-descriptive URLs for the double byte countries? The reason I ask is it's a balance of SEO benefit vs not scaring IE users off with ugly URLs that look dreadful and spammy.
Technical SEO | | Red_Mud_Rookie0