Change Lang. IP base, Browser Base or Manually?
-
Hello
I would like to ask a question about multi lang/international Website. Which one is better for SEO?
User in Different Countries automatically see The website in their Language?
or
User see the English version and can change the language manually?
-
Hi Guys,Gianluca brings up some good points.Talking about very real situations that happen to me quite often. I will prefer to read German and if there is a conversion like a purchase obviously I will have to back out and find the product that I hope is in stock for the US market.I think placing something the language that is native to the country and you can only hope the visitor.
"We saw you are visiting us from the USA. If you want you can go to www.domain.com. If not, do not consider this advice" (this is what Amazon does, for instance). Gianluca
- User see the English version and can change the language manually?
I would say user see native version for whatever country you're actually assuming that they are visiting from. Well said GianlucaAll the best,Thomas
-
You are not telling us if the different language versions are in the same website or in different ones.
In fact, if they are in different domains, the ideal - IMHO - is to not redirect people to the one corresponding to the their IP if they expressly entered in another language version (i.e.: the user is in the USA, like Thomas, but goes to www.domain.de because he is German). In those case is better presenting an advice to those user saying: "We saw you are visiting us from the USA. If you want you can go to www.domain.com. If not, do not consider this advice" (this is what Amazon does, for instance).
If the different language/country versions are on the same domain, then the ideal would be making those users landing on the correct language/country page because they clicked on their corresponding URLs from search thanks to hreflang. But, at the same time, letting them free to navigate throughout all versions (if there are not legal reasons for forbidding that, i.e. products that can be sold in one country but on in others for whatever reason).
Then, again in the case of multicountry in the same domain name, if users goes to the home page because of direct, a link or type-in, then you can use the same tactic I described before in case of different domains.
-
Well think that if you are in the end user / visitor's shoes.
I'm German and although I spend most of my life in United States, I would prefer German I have a better understanding of it. So if you prefer English over any other language or would you like to have to choose?
That's the way I will look at it in. You said something about IP address and they do matter ONLY if you do for have not correctly set up your site in GWT with hreflang.
So the good thing to check out would be WP engine Mercury project GeoIP that might have some interesting things for you to learn more about the subject. It is trying to provide the best end-user experience.
http://wpengine.com/support/geoip-personalizing-content-based-geography/
-
Good question,
I personally lean towards browser language selection and allow the option for manual change. Most major sites do it this way.
I changed my FF browser to DE (German) and noticed many sites will serve my content in German. If it were IP based I wouldn't have noticed many changes. Also with the amount of people who speak multiple languages, deployed overseas, or using proxies, IP based really isn't the best solution.
My vote browser based with manual option hope it helps,
Don
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
-
href lang questions - please help
Hi I have a few questions about href lang implementation and I was hoping for some guidance / opinions. An international website is using mostly a folder structure, but for some locations it might have standalone sub-domains. Some folders are there to target locations and languages, with others just targeting languages. See the list below: domain.com/es-mx [Language: Spanish - Location: Mexico]
International SEO | | MarkCanning
domain.com/pt-br [Language: Portuguese - Location: Brazil]
domain.com/ja-jp [Language: Japanese - Location: Japan]
domain.com/en-jp [Language: English - Location: Japan]
domain.com/fr-ca [Language: French - Location: Canada]
domain.com/en-ca [Language: English - Location: Canada]
domain.com/en-ie [Language: English - Location: Ireland]
domain.com/ar [Language: Arabic]
domain.com/ph [Language: Tagalog]
domain.com/it [Language: Italian]
domain.com/tr [Language: Turkish]
domain.com/kr [Language: Korean]
domain.com/fr [Language: French]
domain.com/ru [Language: Russian]
domain.com/vn [Language: Vietnamese] domain.in/en [Language: English - Location Indian]
domain.in/hi [Language: Hindi - Location Indian] My questions are: Is href lang sitemap equally as good as the href lang meta tag in terms of effectiveness. I know that the sitemap is easier to maintain and upkeep but i don't know which one is better as google recommends both. How do you mix your listings when some are targeting language and country and others are just targeting language speakers (not tied to any specific country). So take for example in the list above: there would be a general site for french speakers and then one for french speakers in Canada. Thanks for your advise in advance.0 -
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 -
International SEO - Alternatives to Automatic IP re-direct
Hello, When doing international SEO I've read that it's not good practice to automatically re-direct users to the correct part of the website based on their IP address. But what alternatives are there to this? Let's say you're targeting the US and the UK through multiregional SEO. What can you do to ensure that users from the US go to the US sub-directory and that users from the UK go to the UK sub-directory? In Moz's international SEO guide it says that: "If you choose to try to guess at the user’s language preference when they enter your site, you can use the browser’s language setting or the IP address and ask the user to confirm the choice. Using JavaScript to do this will ensure that Googlebot does not get confused. Pair this with a good XML sitemap and the user can have a great interaction. Plus, the search engines will be able to crawl and index all of your translated content." Can anyone explain this further? Any help would be much appreciated! Thanks in advance
International SEO | | SEOCT0 -
How can I change the currency Google lists my products with in the SERP?
I.e. This product - http://www.absoluteautomation.ca/fgd400-sensaphone400-p/fgd400.htm - shows up as USD in the SERP. (In the US it just won't show a currency, if Canada it will show USD on the SERP). My pricing is all in CAD, how can I tell Google this? (It knows pricing is CAD in my Google Product Listings/Merchant Center). Thanks!
International SEO | | absoauto0 -
Impact changing domain from ccTLD to .com
I've got a couple of clients who have an international market for their products or services. Both of these clients have a .co.uk domain. For one site the US market is the major audience, the other it's european countries. At the moment, neither of these clients have translated page or content targeted to a specific country. There are no plans at this stage to create such content. Google considers the .co.uk to be targeted to the United Kingdom. The assumption is that by changing this to .com it will increase their international reach. For both the domains, referral and direct traffic is much more diverse than organic (which as you'd expect is heavily UK weighted - but there is some international organic traffic) Does anyone have any experience making such a change? How did the change affect your international reach/visibility? Does anyone have any metrics that they'd like to share that could be used to make a case to clients? (Note, I'm not interested in how you'd go about handling the domain change - I'm happy/confident about doing this.)
International SEO | | DougRoberts0 -
Big changes in beginning of december
For one of our biggest sites I noticed a big difference in ranking drops in the beginning of december. The site is in Swedish so the google updates are a bit different than for google.com. For many of our keyword we dropped far down in the SERPs. Most of the keywords we had at top 10, or top 20, but these got first dropped down to 100/150+ but since then they have started to gain a bit, not near the previous results though. For our main keyword (a really high competitive keyword) we got dropped totally (+200). The site is about 7 years old, have good content, regulary updated (1-2 news a day, 2-4 new articles a week). Our traffic is still pretty good, actually almost the same as previous the big drop for the "hard" keyword. We seem to get more traffic for our long tail keywords instead, which is good. I would like be able to get traffic from both types of keywords though. One more thing to add. I have notice that a couple of our competitors, both in this area and other, also got hit in the same way. This should mean that some sort of google update/filter has hit us. So, in short, my question is if anyone knows about a update/filter in the beginning of december for the Swedish market. And, how can we work ourselves back? Edit: Also, the site ranks number one for the titel of the page and for the titel of the hard keywords, the site also ranks number one. The "right" pages also gets in the top when I do a seach for "site:domain.com keyword".
International SEO | | Lobtec0 -
How do you submit US based news on Google News US from the UK?
How do you go about submitting US news (based in the UK) to get indexed on Google News and show up in the US rather then the UK?
International SEO | | CameronT0 -
What is the best way to make country specific IP redirect for only product pricng pages?
My website has 3 services and its price will be different for US/EU/Developed world and Asian/African countries.Apart from pricing page, all other things remain same. I want to use IP based redirect .I heard this thing is called cloaking and used by black-hat guys. What kind of instructions should I give to my web developer to look best to Google/Search bots and correctly show visitors the intended prices.Is there any caution to be taken care of. Thanks for your time
International SEO | | RyanSat0