Best URL structure for Multinational/Multilingual websites
-
Hi
I am wondering what the best URL format to use is when a website targets several countries, in several languages. (without owning the local domains, only a .com, and ideally to use sub-folders rather than sub-domains.)
As an example, to target a hotel in Sweden (Google.se) are there any MUST-HAVE indicators in the URL to target the relevant countries? Such as hotelsite.com**/se/**hotel-name. Would this represent the language? Or is it the location of the product?
To clarify a bit, I would like to target around 10 countries, with the product pages each having 2 languages (the local language + english). I'm considering using the following format:
hotelsite.com/en/hotel-name (for english) and
hotelsite.com/se/hotel-name (for swedish content of that same product)
and then using rel=”alternate” hreflang=”se-SV” markup to target the /se/ page for Sweden (Google.se) and rel=”alternate” hreflang=”en” for UK? And to also geotarget those in Webmaster tools using those /se/ folders etc.
Would this be sufficient? Or does there need to be an indicator of both the location, AND the language in the URLs? I mean would the URL's need to be hotelsite.com/se/hotel-name/se-SV (for swedish) or can it just be hotelsite.com/se/hotel-name?
Any thoughts on best practice would be greatly appreciated.
-
I have a multilingual & multi-country website : http://www.asaan.com
It runs on a subdomain structure, which I want to convert to subdirectory, for SEO benefits. So, ae.asaan.com would become http://www.asaan.com/ae/
However, I need to understand how best to integrate the language code into the new structure.
So, should it be http://www.asaan.com/ae/en/ (for English for UAE) OR
http://www.asaan.com/ae-en/ (for English in UAE)?
As UAE would also have Arabic, its important for me to understand the benefits of such a structure from SEO perspective
Please advice -
hello,
Nice article. I have a questions:
If you have a multi lang site with Subdirectory:
would you use Subdirectory:
domain.com for the english version or its bertetr to use straight a redirect from domain.com to .com/en/ ? -
Thanks Aleyda, this is great!
I'm wondering, if on a TLD, is it necessary to have both the country code and language in the URL? Or would it be possible to just use language and use href lang in the code to specify the where it's relevant?
I do have each venue in the local language AND in english (though I would prefer both of these languages aimed at the local country - this is because nobody outside the countries search for these venues, but many do also search in english rather than just their local lang)
I have:
- .com/se/sv/venue-name (Venue in Sweden, in Swedish)
- .com/se/en/venue-name (Venue in Sweden, in English)
Or is it better to just use language?
- .com/se-sv/venue-name
- (not sure how to do the english version here)
Would country code be more relevant to use in this case?
Thanks!
-
Hi there!
To target countries the best way to go is with ccTLDs and if you don't have the ccTLDs then it is with subdirectories within a generic TLD, so you'll have:
- For the US: yourbrand.com/category-a/
- For the UK: yourbrand.com/en-gb/category-a/
- For Spain: yourbrand.com/es-es/categoria-a/
- For Mexico: yourbrand.com/es-mx/categoria-a/
Please keep in mind that the "name" of the directory here it's not important but is just to keep it usable and short and follow the language naming conventions. What it is important is that each country has its own consistent directory structure.
It's fundamental that the look and feel as well as all of the elements of each ones of your different country versions (in the different directories) are localized to target their audience: From the translation of the URLs, titles, descriptions, headings, text, etc. to the appropriate language, using the right currency, etc.
In order to geolocate each directory and inform Google that they're targeting different countries you can do it through Google Webmaster Tools with the "Geolocate" option by registering each directory independently and targeting it.
Additionally, if you have many country versions with the same language (US & UK or Spain & Mexico), in order to avoid having content duplication issues, informing Google that each one of these pages are in these languages but targeting different audiences you should use the hreflang tags as specified here.
By doing this you'll make sure you'll have the base set to target your different country search audiences with Google without running into content duplication issues.
For more information about how to establish and identify the best strategy to follow take a look at this post I wrote some time ago about International SEO strategy.
If you have any question just let me know!
-
Thanks for your reply, Stephen.
Is www.example.com/se/en/hotel-name the shortest, best possible way to do this?
So for the swedish language version it would be www.example.com/se/se/hotel-name (to keep the format consistent)?
-
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
-
Good day team.. have problem with my website i lost all ranking and lost 10x times traffic in 1 day without reason...
Good day everybody. My website is www.evilrpm.com and ii have drop in rank and traffic in 1 day without reason... still fighting with that issue .. from that moment i starts to get the errors and in search console if i make testing pages .. after test they can show like warning or error page but in console its green.. i was check everything, and i think that problem in server.. because it happened when i write the truth about my experience with Shopify... this is extraordinary organization i feel like they from the starts was don't give me the way to grow... any idea what the problem? thanks for your support!
International SEO | | EvilTIGER0 -
Hosting your website where you customers are located ?
Is it possible and recommended to host a website in Switzerland ending in.com to rank in the United States ? Or is it better to host it in the country you are targeting ? I know in WMT you can choose the country you want to target but is it as efficient as hosting it on a server located in the country ? Thanks,
International SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
URL Structure - Homepage, Country and State Pages
Hello, I am creating a website (or websites if best format) that will have state-specific boating license courses for every state in the US, Canada and Australia. I would like the content to be available on the website in English, French and Spanish. I want to be the global leader in providing boat test courses. For the (1) homepage, (2) country pages, and (3) state pages, what is best SEO format I should use for:
International SEO | | Monologix
(a) URL structure
(b) "href lang" code
(c) rel canonical code
(d) will meta content with non-English pages need to also be in the non-English language of that page? Also, what server company do you recommend I host my website with? I am a non-programmer and learning SEO, so any and all help will be greatly appreciated! Thank you very much in advance!!!0 -
Homepage URL for multi-language site
Hi, We are setting up a new site, and currently considering the URL and folder structure of the site. We will have 2-3 different language versions, and we have decided to use sub folders for this. My question is regarding the homepage URL. We want the English language site (en) to be the default one, from where you can then change the language. Should I have a folder for each of the language versions (as described below)? www.mydomain.com/en
International SEO | | Awaraman
(this would be the default page where everyone would always come if they type www.mydomain.com to webrowser) www,mydomain.com/ru www.mydomain.com/es Or, would it be better for SEO to have www.mydomain.com as the default URL where we would have the English version of the site, and then have two other folders (as below) where we would have the 2 other language versions: www,mydomain.com/ru www.mydomain.com/es Thank you in advance, BR Sam0 -
Redirect the main site to keyword-rich subfolder / specific page for SEO
Hi,
International SEO | | Awaraman
I have two questions. Question 1: is it worthwhile to redirect the main site to keyword-rich subfolder / specific page for SEO? For example, my company's webpage is www.example.com. Would it make sense to redirect the main site to address www.example.com/service-one-in-certain-city ? I am asking this as I have learned that it is important for SEO to have keywords in the URL, and I was thinking that we could do this and include the most important keywords to the subfolder / specific URL. What are the pros and cons and how important is it to include keywords to folders and page URLs. Should I create folders or pages just the sake of keywords? Question 2: Most companies have their main URL shown as www.example.com when you access their domain. However, some multi-language sites show e.g. www.example.com/en or www.example.com/en/main when you type the domain to your web browser to access the site. I undertstand that this is a common practice to use subdomains or folders to separate the language versions. My question is regarding the subfolder. Is it better to have only the subfolder shown (www.example.com/en) or should you also include the specific page's URL after the subfolder with keywords (www.example.com/en/main or www.example.com/en/service-one-in-certain-city)? I don't really understand why some companies show only the subfolder of a specific language page and some the page's URL after the subfolder. Thanks in advance, Sam0 -
International SEO: best practices for local variants of the same language?
We are translating our site into 17 different languages, including local variants of the same language (i.e. Mexican Spanish and Spain Spanish, Canadian English and British English, etc). Should we add all of these local variants to our site? We don't have the marketing / link building budget (or business need) to put these all on separate ccTLDs, so we are using country-specific subfolders instead (example.com/es/). The translations will be of exceptional quality. Our main goal is to pull in some additional traffic from these translations. If we add these local variants, do you think we can expect to see traffic from these different countries (additional traffic from Canada, England, etc)? Any advice / input would be appreciated.
International SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Http://us.burberry.com/: Big traffic change for top URL (error 593f1ceb2d67)
Please forgive duplicating this question on the SEOMoz & Webmaster Tools forum but I'm hoping to hit both audiences with this question... A few days ago I noticed that our US homepage (us.burberry.com) had dropped from PR5 to PR0, and the page has been deindexed by Google. After checking Webmaster Tools I also received the following message: http://us.burberry.com/: Big traffic change for top URL April 2, 2012Search results clicks for http://us.burberry.com/ have decreased significantly.Message ID: 593f1ceb2d67.We're not doing any link building at all (we've enough on-site issues to deal with). The only changes I have made are adding Google Analytics to the website, uploading sitemaps via Webmaster Tools (it's not linked to from robots.txt yet), and setting the burberry.com and www.burberry.com geo-location settings to 'unlisted' (we want uk.burberry.com appearing in the UK results, us.burberry.com appearing in the US results etc rather than www.burberry.com).I've reversed the geo-location settings but I doubt this would have caused this. We've duplicate copies of our homepage (such as us.burberry.com/store//) from typos in inbound links (and bad programming that allows them to work rather than 404'ing) but I don't think any of this is new. What I don't understand is (a) why this is happening now and (b) why is this just affecting our US homepage? We've ~40 different duplicates of the homepage (us, uk, ca, pt, ro, sk etc etc) so why is the US site being affected and not the others? Does anyone know if this is due to an algorithm change by Google or something else all together? Background:Our website www.burberry.com has 46 subdomains such as uk.burberry.com, ca.burberry.com and us.burberry.com. There is a lot of duplicate content on each subdomain (including basic things like tracking parameters in URLs) and across subdomains (uk.burberry.com/store & us.burberry.com/store are exactly the same), there's very little text on the site (its nearly all images), as well as poor redirects, inaccessible content (AJAX/Flash) and a whole host of basic SEO things that aren't being done correctly. I've joined the company in the last few months and have started addressing these issues but I've got a LOT of work to do yet.One thing that we have in our favour is a link profile that is as clean and natural as they come - there was only ever one link building campaign performed (which was before my time) and I had all of those links removed as soon as I joined the company.Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks for your timeDean RoweEdit: us.burberry.com 301 redirects to us.burberry.com/store/ as explained on the webmaster tools forum, but I don't believe this is the cause as its the same across all subdomains.
International SEO | | FashionLux0 -
Site structure for multi-lingual hotel website (subfolder names)
Hi there superMozers! I´ve read a quite a few questions about multi-lingual sites but none answered my doubt / idea, so here it is: I´m re-designing an old website for a hotel in 4 different languages which are all** hosted on the same .com domain** as follows: example.com/english/ for english example.com/espanol/ for **spanish ** example.com/francais/ for french example.com/portugues/ for portuguese While doing keyword search, I have noticed that many travel agencies separate geographical areas by folders, therefor an **agency pomoting beach hotels in South America **will have a structure as follows: travelagency.com/argentina-beach-hotels/ travelagency.com/peru-beach-hotels/ and they list hotels in each folder, therefor benefiting from those keywords to rank ahead of many independent hotels sites from those areas. What **I would like to **do -rather than just naming those folders with the traditional /en/ for english or /fr/ for french etc- is take advantage of this extra language subfolder to_´include´_ important keywords in the name of the subfolders in the following way (supposing the we have a beach hotel in Argentina): example.com/argentina-beach-hotel/ for english example.com/hotel-playa-argentina/ for **spanish ** example.com/hotel-plage-argentine/ for french example.com/hotel-praia-argentina/ for portuguese Note that the same keywords are used in the name of the folder, but translated into the language the subfolders are. In order to make things clear for the search engines I would specify the language in the html for each page. My doubt is whether google or other search engines may consider this as ´stuffing´ although most travel agencies do it in their site structure. Any Mozers have experience with this, any idea on how search engines may react, or if they could penalise the site? Thanks in advance!
International SEO | | underground0