Url for Turkish, Russian, Chinese, Arabic, Vietnamese and Arabic websites
-
Hello !
We gonna release our next website with new amazing languages.
However I was wondering, is it better to keep the url in English or I can translate them in :
- Turkish (should be fine)
- Chinese
- Arabic
- Vietnamese
- Arabic
- Russian
All websites are properly translated but I'm hesitating for the url.
Tks a lot !
-
6 Months later how well does it do ?
-
So what I did is:
Arabic, Turkish, Russian and Vietnamese URL are 100% translated. For chineses I followed my traductor advise and make in in Pinyin which is supposed to be the latin version of the chinese characters.
Let see how does google, Bing & Yandex like our website now !
-
Based on your previous answer I gonna translate them for a while and see how it's going on.
I think it's a good idea to translate all the URL as our main website is in English and all other are translations.
Never easy to go for those kind of projects.
Tks a lot !
-
The majority of websites I have seen that are for non-Latin language websites, such as Greek and the examples you give, have used URLs using the latin alphabet. Some of the URLs are spelt phonetically, others just use the English equivalent term.
I always like to look at news sites for these regions and see what URL format they use for these. If you look at http://www.newsru.com for Russia, http://alhayat.com/ for Saudi Arabia, you can see the format I mentioned being used.
Now, interestingly, the exception I keep seeing seems to be Wikipedia. Here is their Chinese (simplified) site: http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/ - click on a link there and you get Chinese characters in the URL.
But just look what happens when you try and copy-paste the raw URL: http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%89%A9%E7%90%86%E5%AD%A6 - you get this code instead of the characters. To me (albeit as a Westerner) this could cause problems when linking.
Ultimately, looking at just SEO, if you use latin or local characters it won't be the deciding factor for your performance. From a user experience point of view, you could make an argument for both cases. It certainly won't look out of place if you use latin characters in the URL as that is just the way of the web and indeed the majority of the websites in these regions use such a format. I'd have a look at websites in that region that are related to what you're looking at and see what structure they use. They might use English denominated URLs, or they might give latin-spelled, phonetic URLs (Greece is noticeable for doing this - they spell the word in latin characters as how it would be pronounced in Greek, something I like to call Greeklish). Make your decision based on the user experience, but when doing so take heed of the sites already out there and how they're approaching it and you won't go too far wrong.
Hope this helps.
-
That's also possible.
Check this post: http://uxmag.com/articles/a-url-in-any-language
In any language they will work fine due to Internationalized Resource Identifiers, when you copy paste them they might look weird because of that, but they will still work in a browser.
Edit: offering the URL also translated will be helpful for SEO too. Imagine a user searching for your site in their language, they will probably click on the one that it's written in their language that on the the one that has an English URL.
-
Hello
Tks for this answer. You're totally right for all latin languages, but what about the other ones ?
-
Definitely go for translating the URLs into their relevant languages. This was discussed in a previous thread which is worth looking at.
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
-
Changing the language of the website meta title and description?
Hello, Moz community! I'm planning to change the language of my website title and description from English to rank better for queries on the local language. Do you think this would increase the local language ranking? And in case I need to switch back to English, let's say in 2021, would it be difficult to regain the current rankings? Please let me know if you have any thoughts on this. Thank you!
International SEO | | vhubert2 -
Best way to interlink 25 different language versions of a website?
I have a website which has 25 different language versions on 16 different domains. Hreflan are setup to point to different language versions. In the footer we have deeplinks to the 25 language versions. Site is not spammy but in small niche and many language versions have very few other external links. For some time this site had lost rankings for reasons that are unclear till now. I see that large international sites such as booking.com, tripadvisor, apple all use different approaches to interlink their language versions. Interestingly Tripadvisor is nowadays loading the links to their other language versions dynamically only upon click so that these links do not show up in source code, deviating from their former implementation of static deeplinks to all language versions. Matt Cutts mentioned back in 2013 “If you have 50 different sites, I wouldn’t link to all 50 sites down in the footer of your website, because that can start to look pretty spammy to users. Instead you might just link to no more than three or four or five down in the footer, that sort of thing, or have a link to a global page, and the global page can talk about all the different verions and country versions of your website.” But in their webmaster guidelines google recommends: "Consider cross-linking each language version of a page. That way, a French user who lands on the German version of your page can get to the right language version with a single click." I assume for SEO anyway these links have no value, but for user experience it would certainly be better to provide somewhere deeplinks to other language versions. Also the fact that language versions are on different domains and have few external backlinks may increase a bit the risk in our case. I guess in doubt I would prefer to be safe and load deeplinks only upon click same as tripadvisor. Any thoughts/suggestions on best interlinking in our specific case?
International SEO | | lcourse0 -
Hreflang for bilingual website in the same region/location
Hi everyone, got a quick question concerning the hreflang tag. I have a website with 2 different language versions targeting to the same region(Reason: The area is bilingual however not everyone speaks the other language fluently) Question:
International SEO | | ennovators
Can I use hreflang in that case like: Many thanks in advance0 -
Transfer a website from WP to Joomla
Hello guy's, We have a WP website and we are moving soon to a new site that will be in Joomla.
International SEO | | WayneRooney
Our website is very big and we are ranking with more then 400 keys in all the tshirts industry in the UK.
The new website will be with the same url's and the same domain so we will not lose any of the ranking.
Within this domain we have the blogs as well and a lot of pages. I'd like to get some tips about how to make the transition as smooth as we can to avoid problems with Google ? We have more then 700 visitor a day so we can not take any risks regarding to this. Any help is welcome !!!0 -
For a website in portuguese what would you use? pt.domain.com, br.domain.com or domain.com.br
Hello We are a company with a website in several languages, one of them is portuguese. Our market is 2 times bigger in Brazil than in Portugal, but obviously Brazil has more potential in the future. In domain.com we have our main site in English. What would you use? pt.domain.com, br.domain.com or domain.com.br? In the first case, it means just portuguese, in the second Brazil but it is not geolocalized, and in the third, you are almost ignoring Portugal users... Duplicating content, doesn't seem to make sense... The content is basically international, so it is just the language that matters. Any help will be very much appreciated.
International SEO | | forex-websites0 -
What language to use for URL's for Russian language?
Hi, Our site is in English, Spanish, Danish and Russian - the URL's are individual to the language they are in, but of course, Russian contains some strange characters so I decided not to use them in the URL's Any advice on how to create the URL's for russian language pages? thanks
International SEO | | bjs20100 -
Backlinks to rewrite urls and russian cyrilic characters
Dear Mozers, I've been tried different methods for backlink building and I need some help in order to make it clear in my mind. I have a multilingual website. Also it has russian language which is our basic market. My main keyword is(Недвижимость в Греции) which means Properties in Greece and of course I target my russian first page which has url rewrite (because I have to include my keywords in url) with cyrrilic characters - http://www.halkidikiproperties.com/ru/халкидики-недвижимость-греции/. As I see these backlinks doesn't appear in seomoz tool and there is no improvment in link analysis tab. Do I have to target better my home page than this url rewrited page or maybe do I have to target www.halkidikiproperties.com/ru/ which is the main russian page but before the url rewrite? Also as I see my competitors targeting their homepage without any rewrite but they are not multilingual. Do I have to analyze better this specific rewrited-url by using Link analysis tool? Is it possible to analyze a specific url? Thank a lot , It will be really helpful your assistance. Regards, George
International SEO | | elgreco0 -
French Canadian Website and French Language URLs
Hello, One of my clients has a question on a new Quebec, Canada version of their website. The website content and copy is in the French Canadian language, but the IT Director has asked if, for the purpose of SEO, should the URLs be in French as well? So, this questions has two parts... For SEO, should the URL's be in French or left in English, to avoid crawl errors? For visitor UX, is there any reason to have them in French versus English?
International SEO | | Aviatech0