Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research
      Moz Pro

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research

      Try it free!
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Technical SEO
    4. Best practice for URL - Language/country

    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

    Technical SEO
    4
    4
    4866
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • Kilgray
      Kilgray last edited by

      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:

      www.example.com/de

      www.example.com/es

      Which is a better practice in terms of SEO?

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
      • Daniel_Morgan
        Daniel_Morgan last edited by

        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.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
        • BlueprintMarketing
          BlueprintMarketing last edited by

          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

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
          • TomRayner
            TomRayner last edited by

            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!

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 3
            • 1 / 1
            • First post
              Last post

            Got a burning SEO question?

            Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


            Start my free trial


            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.

            • See all categories

            Related Questions

            • TheHecksler

              Google tries to index non existing language URLs. Why?

              Hi, I am working for a SAAS client. He uses two different language versions by using two different subdomains.
              de.domain.com/company for german and en.domain.com for english. Many thousands URLs has been indexed correctly. But Google Search Console tries to index URLs which were never existing before and are still not existing. de.domain.com**/en/company
              en.domain.com
              /de/**company ... and an thousand more using the /en/ or /de/ in between. We never use this variant and calling these URLs will throw up a 404 Page correctly (but with wrong respond code  -  we`re fixing that 😉 ). But Google tries to index these kind of URLs again and again. And, I couldnt find any source of these URLs. No Website is using this as an out going link, etc.
              We do see in our logfiles, that a Screaming Frog Installation and moz.com w opensiteexplorer were trying to access this earlier. My Question: How does Google comes up with that? From where did they get these URLs, that (to our knowledge) never existed? Any ideas? Thanks 🙂

              Technical SEO | | TheHecksler
              0
            • dkellyagile

              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?
              -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!

              Technical SEO | | dkellyagile
              0
            • hampgunn

              SEO advice on ecommerce url structure where categories contain "/c/"

              Hi! We use Hybris as plattform and I would like input on which url to choose. We must keep "/c/" before the actual category. c stands for category. I.e. this current url format will be shortened and cleaned:
              https://www.granngarden.se/Sortiment/Husdjur/Hund/Hundfoder-%26-Hundmat/c/hundfoder To either: a. 
              https://www.granngarden.se/husdjur/hund/hundfoder/c/hundfoder b.
              https://www.granngarden.se/husdjur/hund/c/hundfoder (hundfoder means dogfood) The question is whether we should keep the duplicated category name (hundfoder) before the "/c/" or not. Will there be SEO disadvantages by removing the duplicate "hundfoder" before the "/c/"? I prefer the shorter version ofc, but do not want to jeopardize any SEO rankings or send confusing signals to search engines or customers due to the "/c/" breaking up the url breadcrumb. What do you guys say and prefer from the above alternatives? Thanks /Hampus

              Technical SEO | | hampgunn
              0
            • FranFerrara

              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 | | FranFerrara
              0
            • niconico101

              Disallow: /404/ - Best Practice?

              Hello Moz Community, My developer has added this to my robots.txt file: Disallow: /404/ Is this considered good practice in the world of SEO? Would you do it with your clients? I feel he has great development knowledge but isn't too well versed in SEO. Thank you in advanced, Nico.

              Technical SEO | | niconico101
              1
            • inlinear

              Correct linking to the /index of a site and subfolders: what's the best practice? link to: domain.com/ or domain.com/index.html ?

              Dear all, starting with my .htaccess file: RewriteEngine On
              RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.inlinear.com$ [NC]
              RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://inlinear.com/$1 [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^./index.html 
              RewriteRule ^(.)index.html$ http://inlinear.com/ [R=301,L] 1. I redirect all URL-requests with www. to the non www-version...
              2. all requests with "index.html" will be redirected to "domain.com/" My questions are: A) When linking from a page to my frontpage (home) the best practice is?: "http://domain.com/" the best and NOT: "http://domain.com/index.php" B) When linking to the index of a subfolder "http://domain.com/products/index.php" I should link also to: "http://domain.com/products/" and not put also the index.php..., right? C) When I define the canonical ULR, should I also define it just: "http://domain.com/products/" or in this case I should link to the definite file: "http://domain.com/products**/index.php**" Is A) B) the best practice? and C) ? Thanks for all replies! 🙂
              Holger

              Technical SEO | | inlinear
              0
            • tevag

              URLs in Greek, Greeklish or English? What is the best way to get great ranking?

              Hello all, I am Greek and I have a quite strange question for you. Greek characters are generally recognized as special characters and need to have UTF-8 encoding. The question is about the URLs of Greek websites. According the advice of Google webmasters blog we should never put the raw greek characters into the URL of a link. We always should use the encoded version if we decide to have Greek characters and encode them or just use  latin characters in the URL. Having Greek characters un-encoded could likely cause technical difficulties with some services, e.g. search engines or other url-processing web pages. To give you an example let's look at A) http://el.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%95%CE%BB%CE%B2%CE%B5%CF%84%CE%AF%CE%B1which is the URL with the encoded Greek characters and it shows up in the browser asB) http://el.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ελβετία The problem with A is that everytime we need to copy the URL and paste it somewhere (in an email, in a social bookmark site, social media site etc) the URL appears like the A, plenty of strange characters and %. This link sometimes may cause broken link issues especially when we try to submit it in social networks and social bookmarks. On the other hand, googlebot reads that url but I am wondering if there is an advantage for the websites who keep the encoded URLs or not (in compairison to the sites who use Greeklish in the URLs)! So the question is: For the SEO issues, is it better to use Greek characters (encoded like this one  http://el.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%95%CE%BB%CE%B2%CE%B5%CF%84%CE%AF%CE%B1) in the URLs or would it be better to use just Greeklish (for example http://el.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elvetia ? Thank you very much for your help! Regards, Lenia

              Technical SEO | | tevag
              0
            • JustinStupid

              Should me URLs be uppercase or lowercase

              I'm in the middle of doing a bunch of 301 redirects for me site. Should I make them Lowercase, uppercase, or does it matter? Also, do I want to be using hyphens (-), or underscores (_)? Any other tips? EX: http://www.stupid.com/golf-slippers.html OR http://www.stupid.com/Golf-Slippers.html

              Technical SEO | | JustinStupid
              0

            Get started with Moz Pro!

            Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

            Start my free trial
            Products
            • Moz Pro
            • Moz Local
            • Moz API
            • Moz Data
            • STAT
            • Product Updates
            Moz Solutions
            • SMB Solutions
            • Agency Solutions
            • Enterprise Solutions
            • Digital Marketers
            Free SEO Tools
            • Domain Authority Checker
            • Link Explorer
            • Keyword Explorer
            • Competitive Research
            • Brand Authority Checker
            • Local Citation Checker
            • MozBar Extension
            • MozCast
            Resources
            • Blog
            • SEO Learning Center
            • Help Hub
            • Beginner's Guide to SEO
            • How-to Guides
            • Moz Academy
            • API Docs
            About Moz
            • About
            • Team
            • Careers
            • Contact
            Why Moz
            • Case Studies
            • Testimonials
            Get Involved
            • Become an Affiliate
            • MozCon
            • Webinars
            • Practical Marketer Series
            • MozPod
            Connect with us

            Contact the Help team

            Join our newsletter
            Moz logo
            © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
            • Accessibility
            • Terms of Use
            • Privacy

            Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.