Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
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
-
Will critical error in wordpress for memory limit affect seo rankings?
will critical error in wordpress to increase memory limit affect seo rankings?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gamstopbet0 -
SEO for multiple languages [Arabic]
Hello all, I am currently managing a Marketplace that comes in two different languages: English & Arabic. The English website is, fortunately, doing quite well in terms of SEO performances but, not the Arabic one. The website has two kinds of content: Static content: controlled by me. It includes menu items, navigation, static pages etc which is properly translated among the two languages User-uploaded content: It includes ads/news posted by the user which may not be translated to Arabic if they chose not to do it. Now if somebody goes to the Arabic website and check a news item that doesn't have an Arabic translation, it will show the English title. I am assuming, serving content in a different language that is specified in the hreflang is a straight no, right?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MozammilStorat0 -
Does it hurt your SEO to have an inaccessible directory in your site structure?
Due to CMS constraints, there may be some nodes in our site tree that are inaccessible and will automatically redirect to their parent folder. Here's an example: www.site.com/folder1/folder2/content, /folder2 redirects to /folder1. This would only be for the single URL itself, not the subpages (i.e. /folder1/folder2/content and anything below that would be accessible). Is there any real risk in this approach from a technical SEO perspective? I'm thinking this is likely a non-issue but I'm hoping someone with more experience can confirm. Another potential option is to have /folder2 accessible (it would be 100% identical to /folder1, long story) and use a canonical tag to point back to /folder1. I'm still waiting to hear if this is possible. Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | digitalcrc0 -
Wordpress Comments Pagination
Hi Mozzers What is your view on the following. Should you Paginate comments to increase page speed? If yes, at what # of comments would you begin pagination? (with the objective being decreasing page load times) Apply rel="canonical" back to the main article URL? eg: url/comment-page-1 => url noindex the comment pages? create a "View all" comments page? Thanks in advance for your help! 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jeremycabral
J0 -
Blog On Subdomain - Do backlinks to the blog posts on Subdomain count as links for main site?
I want to put blog on my site. The IT department is asking that I use a subdomain (myblog.mysite.com) instead of a subfolder (mysite.com/myblog). I am worried b/c it was my understanding that any links I get to my blog posts (if on subdomain) will not count toward the main site (search engines would view almost as other website). The main purpose of this blog is to attract backlinks. That is why I prefer the subfolder location for the Blog. Can anyone tell me if I am thinking about this right? Another solution I am being offered is to use a reverse proxy. Thoughts? Thank you for your time.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ecerbone0 -
How to structure articles on a website.
Hi All, Key to a successful website is quality content - so the Gods of Google tell me. Embrace your audience with quality feature rich articles on your products or services, hints and tips, how to, etc. So you build your article page with all the correct criteria; Long Tail Keyword or phrases hitting the URL, heading, 1st sentance, etc. My question is this
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mark_Ch
Let's say you have 30 articles, where would you place the 30 articles for SEO purposes and user experiences. My thought are:
1] on the home page create a column with a clear heading "Useful articles" and populate the column with links to all 30 articles.
or
2] throughout your website create link references to the articles as part of natural information flow.
or
3] Create a banner or impact logo on the all pages to entice your audience to click and land on dedicated "articles page" Thanks Mark0 -
What Wordpress Update Services Should You Be Using on Your Wordpress Blog?
I have been told that pingomatic.com is all that you need however yesterday I went to a conference and others were recommending to have a good list of pinging services to cover all your bases Here are 4 that have been recommended: pingomatic technorati blogsearch.google.com feedburner Any others that should be included on this list? My goal is not to spam these ping lists however want to make sure my content is getting indexed quickly
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | webestate0 -
Domain expiration and seo
My domain name is free with my service with yahoo but it expires every year and gets extended automatically as I continue service, how does this impact my seo efforts? I've heard that the search engines prefer sites to expire in 3 years or more? Is this a fact?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bronxpad0