URL structure of international hotel website
-
Hai all,
Question about URL structure of international hotel website in Amsterdam: hotelcitadel.nl.
Some information:
- Target group are mainly english speaking guests from UK and US. Besides that guests from the Netherlands and some other countries.
- Website in 6 languages.
- No geo-targetting; just language targetting with hreflang annotations.
Current situation:
hotelcitadel.nl = dutch language version and hotelcitadel.nl/en = english language version
We are thinking about changing this to:
hotelcitadel.nl would become english version and hotelcitadel.nl/nl would become the dutch version.
Reason: root domain hotelcitadel.nl has by far the most links,and making the root domain the english version could help the rankings in english speaking countries like UK and US.
What do you think, would this be a wise idea?
Regards, Maurice
-
Great Stephan, nice to hear and thanks again
Regards, Maurice
-
Hi Maurice,
Yes, that's right: the Hotel Nicolaas site is behaving correctly. When I visit the homepage there, everything is consistent and in English, and the language cookie is set to en-GB. Even when I manually change that cookie value to nl-NL, the content is still in English, because I'm on an English-language URL. To get Dutch content I have to visit the /nl/ directory. That's a much better setup, because there's no way to end up with duplicate English-language content: the URLs are consistent.
Best Regards,
Stephan
-
Hai Stephan,
Thanx again, very helpfull!
I still have 1 question concerning point 2.
Some months ago we rebuilt the website of a “sisterhotel”: www.hotelnicolaas.nl . As far as I can check the website of this hotel does not have the problems/strange behavior anymore as you discribe concerning www.hotelcitadel.nl Is that correct? Is the website of www.hotelnicolaas.nl behaving correctly concerning the languages?
(You will notice that we already changed the URL-structure there and that the homepage is the English version. We still have to add x-default.)
Regards, Maurice
-
Hi Maurice,
Sorry for the delay in getting back to you. To address points 2 and 3 that you've raised there:
2. I'm still seeing this behaviour on the site, and it persists across different browsers. I've attached some images to show what I'm seeing. However, if I then click on the English flag (to visit /en/), and then click the Netherlands flag, a cookie is set: jfcookie[lang]="nl". After this cookie is set, the homepage appears in Dutch for me. So it seems as though visitors to the homepage of your website are served English-language content based on the absense of a jfcookie[lang] cookie, or based on their IP address -- you would have to check with your developers which is the case -- and it's only after visiting one of the other languages and then switching back to Dutch that the homepage will appear in Dutch.
3. I don't believe you would see a rankings boost from doing this. I think that, provided x-default is correctly set (to English, in your case), and this issue with the language cookies/IP address is corrected, you can expect Google to figure out the correct page to show in the results for each country/language combination. I do hear what you're saying about most of your customers speaking English, but I also think that, given you use a ccTLD, it could create a strange user experience to have English content on the homepage and Dutch in a subfolder. And x-default largely solves the problem of most of your users speaking English. I don't think there's enough upside to justify the effort.
-
Hai Stephan,
Thanks for your suggestions.
- Add the x-default is a good idea. I’ll do that.
- Difference HTML lang and hreflang: I do not see this problem. Homepage hotelcitadel.nl: HTML=nl and content is written in dutch and not in english…Am I seeing something else then you do?
- Just to be sure that I understand you correct: What do you think about my proposed change of URL’s, wise? Will it make our website stronger for rankings in the english speaking market? Or better to leave it as it is?
Cheers, Maurice
-
Hi Maurice,
Both of these pages are on the same root domain, because you've (sensibly) used subfolders for languages, instead of subdomains. The arrangement you're thinking of switching to does sound as though it better describes target market: it'd be nice to see x-default set to english, if that's the language spoken by the majority of your visitors/target market.
When I visit the homepage as Googlebot, the hreflang is "nl", but the html lang is "en". Also, the page content appears to be in English. When I then navigate to hotelcitadel.nl/en, I get exactly the same English-language content, with html lang equal to "en" again, and hreflang "en".
The other languages work OK, and are crawlable, but you should correct the duplicate content issue between the homepage and the /en/ subfolder, and also the discrepancy between "html lang" and "hreflang" on the homepage. It should either be definitively in English, for all users, or definitively in Dutch. Perhaps you're using an IP redirect to determine language on the homepage? If so, I'd suggest not doing that. Your other languages seem to be set up OK.
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
-
Question about International SEO
We've just recently launched our website in Canada and our web crawler is showing some pages with "&Country=CA", even if the current page already includes Country=CA. Why is this and how would we go about resolving?
International SEO | | nicole.nelson030 -
International SEO - Targeting US and UK markets
Hi folks, i have a client who is based in italy and they set up a site that sells travel experiences in the sout of Italy (the site currently sit on a server in Italy). The site has been set up as gTLDs: www.example.com They only want to target the US and the UK market to promote their travel experiences and the site has only the english version (the site does not currently offer an italian version). If they decide to go for the gTLDs and not actually change to a ccTLDs (which would be ideal from my point of view) how are the steps to be taken to set this up correctly on GSC? They currently only have one property registered on GSC: www.exapmple.com therefore i guess the next steps are: Add new property - www.example.com/uk and and set up geo targeting for UK Existing property - www.example.com/ set up geo targeting for US In case the client does not have the budget to optimise the content for american and british languages, would still make sense to have 2 separate property in GSC (example.com for US market and example.com/uk for UK market)? Few considerations: Add canonical tag to avoid duplicate content across the two versions of the site (in the event there is no budget to optimise the content for US and UK market)? Thank you all in advance for looking into this David
International SEO | | Davide19840 -
International SEO & Duplicate Content: ccTLD, hreflang, and relcanonical tags
Hi Everyone, I have a client that has two sites (example.com & example.co.uk) each have the same English content, but no hreflang or rel="canonical" tags in place. Would this be interpreted as duplicate content? They haven't changed the copy to speak to specific regions, but have tried targeting the UK with a ccTLD. I've taken a look at some other comparable question on MOZ like this post - > https://moz.com/community/q/international-hreflang-will-this-handle-duplicate-content where one of the answers says **"If no translation is happening within a geo-targeted site, HREFLANG is not necessary." **If hreflang tags are not necessary, then would I need rel="canonical" to avoid duplicate content? Thanks for taking the time to help a fellow SEO out.
International SEO | | ccox10 -
What's the best homepage experince for an international site?
Greeting Mozzers. I have a question for the community, which I would appreciate your input on. If you have a single gTLD that services multiple countires, what do you think is the best homepage UX for the root homepage and why? So the example would be you own website www.company.org and target content to Germany, Japan and Australia with content through the folder structure eg. www.company.org/de-de If someone comes to the www.company.org from a region, would you: Redirect them based on location IP – so if from Germany they land on www.company.org/de-de Let them land on the homepage which offers location selection Let them land on a page with content and offer location selection eg. pop-up or obvious selection box Something I’ve not thought of… I'd appreciate your input. Thanks
International SEO | | RobertChapman0 -
How to best set up international XML site map?
Hi everyone, I've been searching about a problem, but haven't been able to find an answer. We would like to generate a XML site map for an international web shop. This shop has one domain for Dutch visitors (.nl) and another domain for visitors of other countries (Germany, France, Belgium etc.) (.com). The website on the 2 domains looks the same, has the same template and same pages, but as it is targeted to other countries, the pages are in different languages and the urls are also in different languages (see example below for a category bags). Example Netherlands:
International SEO | | DocdataCommerce
Dutch domain: www.client.nl
Example Dutch bags category page: www.client.nl/tassen Example France:
International domain: www.client.com
Example French bags category page: www.client.com/sacs When a visitor is on the Dutch domain (.nl) which shows the Dutch content, he can switch country to for example France in the country switch and then gets redirected to the other, international .com domain. Also the other way round. Now we want to generate a XML sitemap for these 2 domains. As it is the same site, but on 2 domains, development wants to make 1 sitemap, where we take the Dutch version with Dutch domain as basis and in the alternates we specify the other language versions on the other domain (see example below). <loc>http://www.client.nl/tassen</loc>
<xhtml:link<br>rel="alternate"
hreflang="fr"
href="http://www.client.com/sacs"
/></xhtml:link<br> Is this the best way to do this? Or would we need to make 2 site maps, as it are 2 domains?0 -
Setting up a website targeted for the US
Hi, As an English company we have a co.uk domain with .com domain pointing to this. We are now looking to launch a separate (new) website targeting the American market and I have been asked to do the following: If an American or Canadian IP address visits the .com website it automatically goes to our newly created website i.e. website 2. If a non-American or non-Canadian IP address goes to .com it automatically goes to the original website i.e. website 1. If a user is on website 1 and clicks an American flag it takes the website user to website 2. If a user is on website 2 and clicks on the UK flag it takes the website user to website 1. Can anyone advise the best way to go about doing this as I feel that this could effect our search rankings. I am concerned how the search engines will penalize website 2 (original site) which has good rankings. Thanks in advance.
International SEO | | Cybertill0 -
International hreflang - will this handle duplicate content?
The title says it all - if i have duplicate content on my US and UK website, will adding the hreflang tag help google figure out that they are duplicate for a reason and avoid any penalties?
International SEO | | ALLee1 -
International SEO whats best 2 sites co.uk and com.au ?
We have the co.uk and com.au ccTLDS and currently operate out of the UK only but plans are in place for Australia. We can't get hold of the .org or .com so it has to be the ccTLD. I want to use the same site for both countries and either host 2 identical sites (same content) or 1 site with different domain names + meta tags for the 2 countries. Whats the best way to make this happen without screwing things up?
International SEO | | therealmarkhall0