SEO Best Practice for a multi-language and multi-country website
-
Hello Moz Community,
I hope someone could help me identify the best action to take on an on-page optimization confusion I am currently having.
The website I am currently trying to optimize is http://www.riafinancial.com/locations/us/home.aspx. There is an option to view a country specific version of the page, or language version (there are 2 drop down menus on the top, for country or for language).
When viewing a country specific version of the page, the URL changes depending on country selected. Some country versions also updates the content to the language of that country, but some remain English. Example, when viewing the France version of the page (http://www.riafinancial.com/locations/FR/home.aspx), the content is updated to french version, but when viewing the China version (http://www.riafinancial.com/locations/CN/home.aspx), the content is in English. This is because we have not yet translated for all countries (this will eventually be all translated).
Now, when viewing by language, the URL does NOT change. Example, in http://www.riafinancial.com/locations/us/home.aspx, you can choose French, German, Italian, Polish, etc. The content of the page will change based on language chosen, but the URL (including page titles, meta-descriptions) will not change.
My question is, how should I approach this for on-page optimization? Canonical? Hreflang? Any input, feedback, recommendation, suggestion will be greatly appreciated.
Thanks!
Sharon
-
Sharon,
if i'm not mistaken this is what you are trying to do:
http://www.riafinancial.com/locations/us/home.aspx is normally in English (or American to some ;-)) and with the language selection the us part of the url changes to FR for France and CH for Chinese .. etc.
I think you will find your answer in Danny Dovers cheat sheet:
http://moz.com/blog/the-web-developers-seo-cheat-sheet-2013-editionyou can indeed target selected languages and countries with the href lang and using the double parameter (hreflang="fr-FR"). Hope this helps you and solves your problem.
Regards
Jarno
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
-
Does product environment have impact on main website's SEO
We have two environments - product, where login is necessary and where the customers are working. We also have there our help desk, Q&A and knowledge base. Pretty sophisticated page regarding information on a specific topic. We also have our main page where we promote our products, company and events, etc. Main page is www.example.com, where product environment is login.example.com . Does this product environment have an impact on my main page's SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NeringaA0 -
Website Traffic Is Down
Hi, My Website www.financeninvestments.com is down for almost now 2 years. I was receiving the good traffic before this but now the traffic is almost down. I want to again do something to get my Traffic back with some consistent efforts. So what efforts should i do to make this back.Pls suggest.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rahulsoni250 -
Five best practice for SEO
Hello Everyone, I am new to SEO and need some help. I have 6 sites and I need to know what are the top 5 strategies for Off page seo. I mean the most important ones. Thanks Abie
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | signsny0 -
Buying a domain and redirecting it to your website (improves seo?)
hello everyone, imagine that I have a website with Pagerank 7, PA50 DA59... and there is another website who is my competitor... so I decide to buy them... Pagerank3 PA30, DA25.. So I redirect this website to my domain...Using google webmasters I say to Google that it was redirected... So does this improve my SEO or no? Do I get part of the link juice and so on? Can this really improve my rankings?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FCRMediaLietuva0 -
My website has disapeared from all google queries except the ones that contains it´s own website name
Hi, My website URL is: www.nixiweb.com Before June of 2013 my website was always shown at first or second place at google when searching for "hosting gratis". After June of 2013 my website has disappeared from all searches, it only appears when I search for the site name, eg: "nixiweb" or “www.nixiweb.com” At webmaster tools, the search queries table only shows queries related to my website name (eg: "nixiweb" or “xixiweb”), and none related to any other keyword. Can anybody help me understanding which is the problem with my site? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nixiweb0 -
An affiliate website uses datafeeds and around 65.000 products are deleted in the new feeds. What are the best practises to do with the product pages? 404 ALL pages, 301 Redirect to the upper catagory?
Note: All product pages are on INDEX FOLLOW. Right now this is happening with the deleted productpages: 1. When a product is removed from the new datafeed the pages stay online and are showing simliar products for 3 months. The productpages are removed from the categorie pages but not from the sitemap! 2. Pages receiving more than 3 hits after the first 3 months keep on existing and also in the sitemaps. These pages are not shown in the categories. 3. Pages from deleted datafeeds that receive 2 hits or less, are getting a 301 redirect to the upper categorie for again 3 months 4. Afther the last 3 months all 301 redirects are getting a customized 404 page with similar products. Any suggestions of Comments about this structure? 🙂 Issues to think about:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Zanox
- The amount of 404 pages Google is warning about in GWT
- Right now all productpages are indexed
- Use as much value as possible in the right way from all pages
- Usability for the visitor Extra info about the near future: Beceause of the duplicate content issue with datafeeds we are going to put all product pages on NOINDEX, FOLLOW and focus only on category and subcategory pages.0 -
Geo targeting - same language, different countries
We are in serps in US google, but not in the UK, Australia. Also we have non-english translations of the website - these options works very well. Are there any logic options to make uk.domain.com? We can add United Kingdom in the description and texts. Can this do though in www.google.co.uk ? Same with AU. Website content fits all countries.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bele0 -
Production and Priority Issue for SEO and Website Usability
I am a NOVICE .........My website is about 4 months old. My developer/programmer only has 4-6 hours of work a week so it is going to take 4 months to finish two weeks of work. So I have to prioritize the things that are best for SEO (Our architecture is PHP,Apache and Zend) .** If you are interested I would be curious to how you would prioritize some or all of these. Or at least as many as you can until you get bored.** 1. Optimizing Cart/Conversion - 7 hrs - (Extremely low conversion rates)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Boodreaux
2. Optimizing Speed for usability -10+ hrs (Very slow on initial load time) 10-14 sec
3. Filling in all Titles and Metadata - 2 hrs
4. Contact persistence with cookie...enter data only once. - 2 hrs
5. Social panels for sharing content - 3 hrs
6. Custom notifications for those who opt in. for updates - 5 hrs
7. Shorten 12 key URL's and optimize with key words - 3 hrs (I rank this very high)
8. Install Wordpress Blog - 5-10 hrs
9. RSS Feed - 5 hrs ( Run a feed real time on side of page)
10. Create Content Management System for me - 20 hrs (So I can make changes)
11. Keywords for H-1 Tags - 1 hr
12. At tag for images - 1 hr
13. Use of bold /italics - 2 hrs
14. Canonical tag in head - 3 hrs Any expert advice will be greatly appreciated. Boodreaux PS After studying SEO for 1 month I think the priorities should be #7,#3, #2, #1, #5 (on landing pages) #11, #12,#6, #4, #13, #14, #8, #9, #100