Best multi-language site strategy?
-
When reading about multi-language site structure, general knowledge says that there are 2 right ways of doing it right:
- Assign one domain per region/ language:
...
If a country has more than one language, such as Switzerland, you can create folders for those languages:
www.domain.ch/fr - in french
www.domain.ch/de - in german
- Have a unique domain www.domain.com for the whole site and create folders for language region:
...
If a language is spoken in more than one country, you can create subfolders
www.domain.com/fr-ch - french in switzerland
www.domain.com/de-ch - german in switzerland
At first sight, it seems that option 1 is the right one. However, sites such as www.apple.com are using option 2. I am unable to decide... what would you recommend? Any objective criteria?
-
Look at this WhiteBoard Friday : http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-where-to-host-and-how-to-target-whiteboard-friday
My personal choice is to use one domain per language and I've good result also in country with more than one language like Belgium.
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
-
I am looking for an SEO strategy
I am looking for an SEO strategy, a step by step procedure to follow to rank my website https://infinitelabz.com . Can somebody help?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KHsdhkfn0 -
Best set up for mobile site for SEO
Hello Does anyone have any input into what is the best way to have a mobile website URL structure for not responsive display sites. mobile.site.com www.site.com/m/ or neither have it just display on the same URL. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | christaylorconsulting0 -
How do I best handle Duplicate Content on an IIS site using 301 redirects?
The crawl report for a site indicates the existence of both www and non-www content, which I am aware is duplicate. However, only the www pages are indexed**, which is throwing me off. There are not any 'no-index' tags on the non-www pages and nothing in robots.txt and I can't find a sitemap. I believe a 301 redirect from the non-www pages is what is in order. Is this accurate? I believe the site is built using asp.net on IIS as the pages end in .asp. (not very familiar to me) There are multiple versions of the homepage, including 'index.html' and 'default.asp.' Meta refresh tags are being used to point to 'default.asp'. What has been done: 1. I set the preferred domain to 'www' in Google's Webmaster Tools, as most links already point to www. 2. The Wordpress blog which sits in a /blog subdirectory has been set with rel="canonical" to point to the www version. What I have asked the programmer to do: 1. Add 301 redirects from the non-www pages to the www pages. 2. Set all versions of the homepage to redirect to www.site.org using 301 redirects as opposed to meta refresh tags. Have all bases been covered correctly? One more concern: I notice the canonical tags in the source code of the blog use a trailing slash - will this create a problem of inconsistency? (And why is rel="canonical" the standard for Wordpress SEO plugins while 301 redirects are preferred for SEO?) Thanks a million! **To clarify regarding the indexation of non-www pages: A search for 'site:site.org -inurl:www' returns only 7 pages without www which are all blog pages without content (Code 200, not 404 - maybe deleted or moved - which is perhaps another 301 redirect issue).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kimmiedawn0 -
Mobile Site Outranking Main Site
Hi, We have recently been hit with a problem regarding our mobile site, where it is outranking our main site. This is causing a drop in orders and ranknings for our main site. It would appear that google has indexed our mobile site and so the two are now competing against each other. Our main site is on a .co.uk and our mobile site on a .mobi, but we have now taken down the mobile site until we get this sorted. Does anyone else have any experience of this happening and how to stop it happening again? Thanks Steve
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Steve251 -
Noindex Mobile Site?
So I wanted to get everyone's opinion. Have a client in online retail on ASP and their developers built a mobile site a while back before we took the client on. For the sake of this post, just assume, resources are limited anddevelopers are not good (constantly break things we request to get fixed). They never installed analytics on the mobile site, so all I have to go off of is referral data on the main stores GA account for m.example.com However if I look to see what is indexed by doing site:m.example.com am not seeing many pages. The mobile site has a ton of internal links in GWT and am questioning its negative impact as there are no canonicals, no mobile sitemap present. In the ideal world, I would implement proper Mobile SEO practices but given the resources of no dev budget and devs not being good, I was thinking about noindexing the mobile site since I can RDP into the site and access robots. Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sean_Dawes0 -
Sites banned from Google?
How do you find out sites banned from Google? I know how to find out sites no longer cached, or is it the same thing once deindexed? As always aprpeciate your advice everyone.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pauledwards0 -
Optimize a Classifieds Site
Hi, I have a classifieds website and would like to optimize it. The issues/questions I have: A Classifieds site has, say, 500 cities. Is it better to create separate subdomains for each city (http://city_name.site.com) or subdirectory (http://site.com/city_name)? Now in each city, there will be say 50 categories. Now these 50 categories are common across all the cities. Hence, the layout and content will be the same with difference of latest ads from each city and name of the city and the urls pointing to each category in the relevant city. The site architecture of a classifieds site is highly prone to have major content which is not really a duplicate content. What is the best way to deal with this situation? I have been hit by Panda in April 2011 with traffic going down 50%. However, the traffic since then has been around same level. How to best handle the duplicate content penalty in case with site like a classifieds site. Cheers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ketan90 -
Press Release Sites
Ok, I am getting a lot of conflicting information about press release sites. i have been doing press release's for a while (mostly manually), I have also tried a few companies that claim to do it well (never do). After the Panda update the PR sites I have been using are just not as effective. Does anyone else have this problem or are there better PR sites that can be recommended.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TomBarker820