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).
-
Does it make sense to target my Portuguese translation for Brazil to Portugal as well? Or do I create another version of the site that is hreflang=pr so that people that speak Portuguese in other locations throughout the world will at least get a Portuguese translation?
-
After doing some more research I'm going to go with your suggestion...thanks!
-
By using en-US would I be leaving out English speaking users in other countries? I'm wondering if I should use this format:
For English
For Portuguese
-
Hey Brandon,
I would just do en-US and not bother about having just en. See below for example.
For English
For Portuguese
-
So when implementing hreflang in the head section, do you call out the alternative and main language on every single page?
So for example if I'm implementing Brazilian Portuguese where the main language is English, for my English site it would be:
Then for the Portuguese site it would be:
-
Yup, I think as long as you specify the hreflang for all languages including the principale one you'll be fine.
-
Thanks very much for the answer, i know about the hreflanf, with sub-folder i think for the principal language you can omitted the sub-folder: example.com for spanish and example.com/en for english, but not so sure if that is good.
-
Hi,
I've actually had to deal with the same issue this year. From the research I did a while ago there's one solution that stood out for me.
I went with the sub-folder. example.com/en & example.com/es and made sure that all my pages add the hreflang attribute that points the page with its language info.
The main benefits of using a subfolder is that you don't have to share your domain authority between the different language sites.
Here's some resource to get you started
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
-
Top 10 SEO Experts in the World
Here are some of the top SEO experts in the world known for their contributions to the field, thought leadership, and innovative strategies: Rand Fishkin - Co-founder of Moz and SparkToro, widely known for his insights and contributions to SEO. Neil Patel - Co-founder of Crazy Egg, Hello Bar, and KISSmetrics, renowned for his SEO and digital marketing expertise. 3.. Brian Dean - Founder of Backlinko, famous for his advanced SEO strategies and detailed guides. Rafay Waqar - Co-founder of SEOServices and a LinkedIn influencer, he provide valuable insights into search engine algorithms and updates. Barry Schwartz - Founder of Search Engine Roundtable, known for his in-depth coverage of SEO news and trends. Aleyda Solis - International SEO consultant and founder of Orainti, recognized for her expertise in technical SEO and international SEO strategies. Bill Slawski - Director of SEO Research at Go Fish Digital, known for his deep understanding of search engine patents and algorithms. Vanessa Fox - Creator of Google Webmaster Central and author of "Marketing in the Age of Google," known for her expertise in technical SEO and analytics. Ann Smarty - Founder of Viral Content Bee and a well-known figure in the SEO community for her content marketing and link-building expertise. Cyrus Shepard - Former Head of SEO at Moz and founder of Zyppy, known for his comprehensive SEO knowledge and actionable insights.
International SEO | | cupll.rs10 -
What are the best practices for translation of city/state names for international SEO? (ie. New York in English vs. Nueva York in Spanish)
I'm working on international SEO / translation of a global travel site. While we have a global keyword research and translation strategy in process for each market they serve, I've run into a unique question. Overall, we are translating (and localizing) content for each market but aren't sure what to do with location names. Each country/state has cities and locations that have their own dedicated pages. I see three options for these location names (when titling a page and writing content): keep them in English, translate the names in the market languages, or use a combination of the two. The challenge with altering the location names to the market languages is that they are truly not known by those names. Though there are some instances where it may make sense…for instance **New York **in Spanish would be "Nueva York" with **‘**Nueva' being the Spanish translation of ‘new’. There are other instances, where no translation exists. If you’ve had a similar experience I'd love to hear your approach/recommendation.
International SEO | | JonClark150 -
Need advice - International SEO strategy
Hello Moz ! I've been working for some months on a very interesting SEO project. I even opened some discussions on it (Multi Regional website - Folder strategy, Multi Company websites) with amazing feedbacks from the community. INITIAL PROJECT Set up an international website with different subsidiaries name, 1 person to manage the whole web, different locations / regions / languages and same products. INITIAL IDEAS For the beginning of the project we opened a main website in .com with subfolders for the other subsidiaries .com/es ... However our business is mainly in English so we decided to focus harder (closing the .com/uk, using a unic com/blog, opening more pages etc.) on the main domain in .com CURRENT ISSUE How to rank locally our services with: Main domain in .com Last Google updates against link building Most of customers searching in English in different countries Company working in more than 80 countries, through 13 subsidiaries **IDEA ** I was thinking about using our blog to focus 3 months on a thematic around one service (blog post with link to the services article on our website, guest blogging with link to a blog post, discussions on Linkedin around the thematics, etc.) QUESTION What could be the best strategy to rank locally our products in this case ? Hope you can share your best advise. I guess I'm not the unique one to face this issue. So it'll be good to make a good strategy for all our community 🙂 Tks a lot ! Florian
International SEO | | AymanH0 -
International SEO
Anyone have any good free resources for international SEO best practices? I've read through most of the common stuff and wondered if there's anything I'm missing. We are getting ready to launch a version of our website in the UK and I could use any hints or advice that could make my life easier. My biggest question is whether to keep the sites as 1 site (single domain with sub-folder for sharing incoming link profile) or to get a .UK domain and do everything from scratch. (it seems like a sub-domain is not the way to go?). I also wonder if any of you can share things to look out for, pitfalls, mistakes, etc...? TIA for any help/answers!
International SEO | | DownPour0 -
Have I over-optimized (on-site optimization using SEOMoz tool)?
Hey all, Quite new to SEO although I tried to educate myself as much as I could. I just spent (really) a lot of time doing the onsite optimization of a few key pages of a website in 3 languages (in which I'm more or less conversational - with the help of Google Translate). I know content should not be misleading and feel natural. I think the result is natural but I'm not sure... I optimized as much as I could so as to reach an "A" grade as per SEOMoz tool for each page, for 1-4 keywords per page. I feel sometimes I stretched a bit, but not sure what "stretching" is given my lack of experience. So I was wondering if some of you could tell me what they thought and if there was some obvious don'ts in my work. Here are a few key pages I have optimized: The homepage: http://goo.gl/00Fti The search results page: http://goo.gl/b1fxE The property page: http://goo.gl/t2GdY The destinations page: http://goo.gl/0Kc0l Note that the other versions of the page - Italian & Spanish - may be more awkward, so I welcome your opinions for these as well (dropdown on top of the page to change the language). Thanks!!
International SEO | | Philoups0 -
Google UK picking up USA Site
I have a site with two subfolders one is .../uk and one is .../us Part of the content on the two sites is the same and part is unique. The US site's language is set to en and the UK site's language is set to en_gb. I have setup geo-targeting in webmaster tools. The problem is that the home page is a GEO-IP redirect and it seems to be picking up information from the US site even on google uk. I'm not concerned too much about getting the uk site crawled as we submit a sitemap for that anyway. But my concern is that if I setup the geo-ip redirect as a 301 will my UK site loose all of it's ranking? Also am I likely to be penalised for duplicate content?
International SEO | | matthewdolman0 -
The case of the attempted server hacking and it's effect on SEO
Since relaunch earlier this year, we've had patches where our site has failed to load. It's happened every so often, but, until I receive the server logs from the company who hosts the site, I won't know exactly when this issue has occurred. Until now, we've only noticed it when someone in the company has tried, and failed, to access the site. Again, it happened today. After hassling our developers/hosting firm for a conclusive answer as to why, it emerged that their server (perhaps our site in particular because of the nature of our business) had been the target of an attempted hacking. We've now concluded that every time our site has messed around like this, it's because of a possible hack. Would anyone in SEOmoz Land be able to tell me if this is going to have a negative impact for our SEO and site performance? Would search engines be able to tell if a potential hack is, or was, occurring? Would we then be penalised? Please feel free to elaborate on the hacking process in general, too, if you can because this is the first time I've encountered it. Thanks
International SEO | | Martin_S0 -
Internationalization and SEO
Hi Everyone, This is my first post in this new Q & A section!! This interface looks great!! Now onto the question.... We have www.example.com in English that has 50,000+ URLs. We are in the process of building a new site example.de targeting German users. The German site (www.example.de) will be a mirror of the English site at launch as we want to give a full experience to people visiting the .de domain. However, not all pages will be localized as we can't support that. We are planning on localizing the core sets of pages (~500) and leaving the rest in English. Post launch, we will have additional milestones to localize the remaining pages until the entire site is localized (converted to German). Is this the correct way to go? Will this cause duplicate content issue?
International SEO | | Amjath
Will adding "rel=canonical" tag on these pages solve the purpose? Thanks for the help!0