Wordpress Blog in 2 languages. How to SEO or structure it?
-
Hi Moz community,
I have got a wordpress blog currently in the spanish language. I want to create the same blog content but in english version. (manually translate it to english instead of using translation service such as Google Translate). How should i structure the blog for SEO? How will it work? Any structure markups i should know about?
Any examples?
Thanks
-
Just food for thought, another option is to host a Wordpress multi-site or even two separate versions of Wordpress, one for each language. I find this less complicated when it comes to plugin and template compatibility, plus you can control access a bit better.
Avoid using Javascript to translate text.
Avoid putting content in multiple languages on a single page.
Do link each page in one language to the translated page to avoid 404 errors. If your language selector automatically directs users from an www.site.com/en to www.site.com/es domain, make sure your URLs for translated pages match or you'll get a lot of 404 errors. This will hurt you a great deal.
-
Hola,
I assume your blog is a wordpress.org and not a wordpress.com one.
If so, install the WPML plugin, which (copying and pasting from its website) l_ets you do SEO for each language separately. You can set SEO attributes for the homepage, internal pages and categories for each language. Translations appear in their unique URLs and you can even put different languages in completely different domains. WPML follows Google Webmasters’ specifications for multilingual sites to the letter, letting your sites rank high on local search results. Of course, WPML is fully compatible with SEO plugins._
It will create a /en/ subfolder for the language you're translating your blog to, which seems to be your preferred solution (in other cases, i.e. a WooCommerce based on WP, it may be better using the domain option WPML offers too).
With WPML you will be able to translate everything, not just your posts (template, plugins et al).
The URL structure will mirror the main language one, but translated to English. So if you have something like www.myblog.com/seo/como-hacer-link-building, the English version will be: www.myblog.com/en/seo/how-to-do-link-building.
It also automatically implement the hreflang annotations (so you don't have to think about them).
It is compatible with WordPress SEO by Yoast, so every translated page/post can be finely optimized.
Honestly, even though the answer here above are correct (apart the "English post" category one, which is not really the ideal solution), I warmly suggest you to use WPML.
-
Can you elaborate on the duplicate content issue? Both are same content but in different languages.
I am thinking of
example.com/blog/en/urlgoeshere and example.com/blog/bm/urlgoeshere
What else should i be worried about?
Thanks
-
Hey Edmond,
Vic already answered with most of what I was going to say - a big thing to remember is the issue of duplicate content if you are making a direct translation. You probably want to keep all content under the same domain for potential future link-building efforts. Using the /en approach Vic suggested will help with this.
Bear in mind, however, that such an approach can result in duplicate content penalties (see: Panda) if you are not careful with the translation process. It might be better to paraphrase your content when translating it in order to avoid these penalties.
The rest depends on what aspects of the site you want to translate, where your markets are and what language your potential customers are likely to speak.
Feel free to touch base with any questions,
Rob
-
Hi, Edmond,
Is it just the blog content you’re looking to translate or the entire site?
If it’s the entire site, you may consider putting all of your English content under a /en/ subdirectory. For example: http://yoursite.com/en/englishcontentgoeshere.
As far as the blog by itself goes, I think you would be able to employ the same structure.
Alternatively, you may consider putting all of the English content under a Category called “Content in English” or something similar. This is probably the simplest approach.
One important thing to consider is your target market. Are you targeting English-speaking audience in U.S. or in other countries? Where is your Spanish-speaking site based at and who is your target audience? You will need to plan for that and localize accordingly.
Vic
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
-
Entities and SEO
How do you find the correct words (entities) to explain an entity ? The words (entities) that go together within a sentence seem to be based on the specific corpus (the keyword you want to rank ) and when they are million of results it seems impossible to find what word / entity is going to explain the entity / concept I want to explain. It seems that I got a better chance at the lottery 🙂 a
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics
Do you have any advice or software that could parse and find the words that co-occure the most often out of millions of results !! Thank you,0 -
Hubspot (Primary CMS) and WordPress Blog on Subfolder?
We are thinking about transitioning a WordPress blog from a subdomain to subfolder on our main root domain that is run on Hubspot. Is there anything that we need to be aware of? In my mind, it should be a simply as creating the WordPress instance on a subfolder and then importing everything in and then setting up 301 redirects. Has anyone done this before? I ask because our product managers would like to continue to update their blogs within the WordPress environment rather than transition over to Hubspot. Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | s1jkirkpatrick0 -
Are pop-unders bad for SEO?
Hi all, I run a travel site that specializes in hotel bookings. We're working with a third-party advertiser to launch a pop-under unit when someone searches for hotels on our site. (This unit is of the "also try your search on these competing sites" variety.) I'm worried, however, that this might affect our SEO, especially in light of this on their site: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2721313?hl=en Would Google even see these pop-unders? (Are pop-unders treated the same as pop-overs?) And, if so, would G see them as unwanted and treat them as a nuisance? Could it lead to negative SEO consequences? Any thoughts would be appreciated. Thanks! Tom
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TomNYC0 -
Changing URL structure of date-structured blog with 301 redirects
Howdy Moz, We've recently bought a new domain and we're looking to change over to it. We're also wanting to change our permalink structure. Right now, it's a WordPress site that uses the post date in the URL. As an example: http://blog.mydomain.com/2015/01/09/my-blog-post/ We'd like to use mod_rewrite to change this using regular expressions, to: http://newdomain.com/blog/my-blog-post/ Would this be an appropriate solution? RedirectMatch 301 /./././(.) /blog/$1
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IanOBrien0 -
Does the blog comments work?
Hi there, I have some keywords which varies difficulty from 1% -30 % . I can rank my urls with some blog comments from high pr blog pages? Is any way to rank them all fast? I am looking for the most cheap and easy way to rank them. One article of 1000 words lets say and some 200-300 blog comments are enough? Site is new, ranks for some other small keywords already.Has zero backlinks almost. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nyanainc0 -
SEO - What Should We Do...
Hi Guys, Hope your all OK. Were having major problems with our homepage ranking for our main keyword - we were originally 4 but over the Christmas period our SEO company reported a fault with one of there servers that they were using for links, because of this fault these links were de-indexed from the search engine and in turn we have plummeted to 10th... At the time we had a landing page with an exact match keyword in it, e.g: www.ourdomainname.co.uk/key-word/ we were told to 301 this to our main page in Google but when we have looked today its now showing this page instead of our homepage. We also have another domain that we are using for a forum at the moment, now this domain name is an exact match doming e.g www.keyword.co.uk. The question is do we gamble and 301 our whole site to www.keyword.co.uk and see if we can get this ranking better? Thanks, Scott
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ScottBaxter0 -
Seo Hosting
Can anyone suggest me some seo hosting providers?But in better price like hostgator?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nyanainc0 -
Whitelabel stores and consequences for SEO
Hello I have a very important question to you. We are planning to a open 2 – 5 “whitelabel” web shops in each country that run on the same platform and server (Demandware) as our current web sites. Each white label site will have own domain. The product selection will be identical and prices will be identical, but the sites will be branded differently with other logo and colors and name for the store. The question is about the consequences for SEO for such project. What are the risks for the rankings for us, if the whitelabel products have same product descriptions and names as our existing web shop has? Will it affect our rankings? How would google rank 3 whitelabel stores that have own domains but otherwise identical product content? What is the minimal that should be changed from SEO point of view in order to avoid Google penalties or ranking problems? Looking forward to hear from you Greetings,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EuropeanSEOguy
Rolf0