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.
Two versions of a website with different languages - Best way to do it?
-
I'm working on a website for a Swedish artist and her page is in Swedish, everything is in Swedish on the site, even though it's not a lot of text on the site. We would like to have the site in English too, or another version of the site in English on a separate domain, what's the best way to proceed from here?
The domain name is a .se (swedish domain), would it be better to create a another domain and host the english version of the site on a .com domain? Or will we bump into problems with duplicate content if we create a replica of the swedish site in english.
We're using wordpress and I know that there's translation plugins out there, is that a good option?
I'm a bit clueless on how to proceed and would love some help or guidance here.
-
Hi Fisken,
The best way to proceed depends on who you want to target:
- If you look to target a global or location independent English speaking audience (they might be in any country, the US, UK, Europe, etc.): Using a .com (or any generic domain, which won't be restricted to a specific country) will be the best way to go.
- If you look to target only English speakers located in Sweden: The easiest way would be to enable a sub-directory in your current .se domain: yourbrand.se/en/. If a sub-directory is not possible, then you can also enable a sub-domain for the new language, although if the site is small, I would recommend the sub-directory as it's easier to set and it inherits in a direct way the current popularity you have from your current version. This is not so straight-forward when working with sub-domains. Please, keep in mind that this option is only good if you really want to just target English speakers located in Sweden, not abroad; as if you keep your English version inside your .se domain it will be automatically geotargeted to Sweden.
- If you look to target a specifically located English speaking audience abroad: Use the country specific ccTLD to target its English speaking audience. For example, if you want target specifically people in the UK or Australia, the best would be that you use a .uk or a .au ccTLD for each case. Choose this option only if you really want to focus your English speaking version to people located in a specific country.
For more international SEO information, please take a look at:
If you have any doubts, just let me know!
-
In the past I have had it all on the same domain using WordPress and WPML. It is a paid plugin but It makes your life as an admin so much easier! The way I would set it up is through **.se/english **(easily accomplished in WPML).
In WPML you can do the translations yourself or submit the articles to a translator through the plugin.
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
-
How do you optimise a website for European traffic?
I have a design portfolio website here https://www.nicholsoncreative.com/ which uses a .com but is currently configured through the Search Console to appear in results for Google.co.uk. I am going to be restructuring the website and optimisation and I want to bring in more traffic/enquiries/business from around Europe. As there's no Google.eu, and as Google also serves results based on the searchers geographic location it would seem difficult to structure and optimise content so that results can be found across all of Europe. I assume simply switching to a .eu domain extension for my own website wouldn't solve the problem? I also assume that creating content in different languages would be a logical (if time consuming) option? Are there any other tried and trusted techniques that can be used to target traffic throughout Europe? I'd appreciate any advice.
International SEO | | JCN-SBWD0 -
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 -
What is the proper way to setup hreflang tags on my English and Spanish site?
I have a full English website at http://www.example.com and I have a Spanish version of the website at http://spanish.example.com but only about half of the English pages were translated and exist on the Spanish site. Should I just add a sitemap to both sites with hreflang tags that point to the correct version of the page? Is this a proper way to set this up? I was going to repeat this same process for all of the applicable URLs that exist on both versions of the website (English and Spanish). Is it okay to have hreflang="es" or do I need to have a country code attached as well? There are many Spanish speaking countries and I don't know if I need to list them all out. For example hreflang="es-bo" (Bolivia), hreflang="es-cl" (Chile), hreflang="es-co" (Columbia), etc... Sitemap example for English website URL:
International SEO | | peteboyd
<url><loc>http://www.example.com/</loc></url> Sitemap example for Spanish website URL:
<url><loc>http://spanish.example.com/</loc></url> Thanks in advance for your feedback and help!0 -
What are the best practices for translation of city/state names for international SEO? (ie. New York in English vs. Nueva York in Spanish)
I'm working on international SEO / translation of a global travel site. While we have a global keyword research and translation strategy in process for each market they serve, I've run into a unique question. Overall, we are translating (and localizing) content for each market but aren't sure what to do with location names. Each country/state has cities and locations that have their own dedicated pages. I see three options for these location names (when titling a page and writing content): keep them in English, translate the names in the market languages, or use a combination of the two. The challenge with altering the location names to the market languages is that they are truly not known by those names. Though there are some instances where it may make sense…for instance **New York **in Spanish would be "Nueva York" with **‘**Nueva' being the Spanish translation of ‘new’. There are other instances, where no translation exists. If you’ve had a similar experience I'd love to hear your approach/recommendation.
International SEO | | JonClark150 -
How do I get a UK website to rank in Dubai?
We are trying to get a UK-based children's furniture website to rank in Dubai. We have had a couple of orders from wealthy expats in Dubai and it seems to be the correct target market. Does anyone have any specific knowledge of this area? We are promoting the same website as for the UK market. Also does anyone know any user behaviour stats on expatriates using search engines? Do they carry on using the version of Google they are used to, or do most change to the local version of Google? Thanks in advance
International SEO | | Wagada0 -
Best URL structure for Multinational/Multilingual websites
Hi I am wondering what the best URL format to use is when a website targets several countries, in several languages. (without owning the local domains, only a .com, and ideally to use sub-folders rather than sub-domains.) As an example, to target a hotel in Sweden (Google.se) are there any MUST-HAVE indicators in the URL to target the relevant countries? Such as hotelsite.com**/se/**hotel-name. Would this represent the language? Or is it the location of the product? To clarify a bit, I would like to target around 10 countries, with the product pages each having 2 languages (the local language + english). I'm considering using the following format: hotelsite.com/en/hotel-name (for english) and hotelsite.com/se/hotel-name (for swedish content of that same product) and then using rel=”alternate” hreflang=”se-SV” markup to target the /se/ page for Sweden (Google.se) and rel=”alternate” hreflang=”en” for UK? And to also geotarget those in Webmaster tools using those /se/ folders etc. Would this be sufficient? Or does there need to be an indicator of both the location, AND the language in the URLs? I mean would the URL's need to be hotelsite.com/se/hotel-name/se-SV (for swedish) or can it just be hotelsite.com/se/hotel-name? Any thoughts on best practice would be greatly appreciated.
International SEO | | pikka0 -
Multi Regional website - Folder strategy
Hello Seomoz people ! I've been struggling for some time now with an international website project. It's gonna be an:international website with joomla. To sum up: We have an international company The company has 13 subsidiaries worldwide (same products, different names) The company doesn't have enough resources to get 13 independent websites Some subsidiaries work in one country / one language, some others on a region (several countries, several languages) Thanks to your community we decided to: Get a main website company.com Get subsidiaries folders (middle east, oceania and south america will be easier to link to their subsidiary) .com/asia .com/middle-east .com/oceania .com/south-america .com/uk .com/usa .com/fr .com/es .com/de .com/ma .com/dz .com/it We also need to: Get some websites in different languages .com/asia-cn .com/asia-en etc. Now how do we do to manage: Regional websites (the first 4th on the upper list) Google allows to affect a website to a country not region Will they compete with the .com ? How do we set up them for google ? How do we avoid duplicate content and keep local ranking .com/asia-en/services1.html will have the exact same content that_.com/services1.html_ If we use canonical from _.com/asia-en/services1.htm_l to _.com/services1.html , d_oes that mean /asia will not rank in asia ? Hope you can help us to figure us the best solution for this good project ! Thanks a lot. Florian
International SEO | | AymanH1 -
Multilingual Ecommerce Product Pages Best Practices
Hi Mozzers, We have a marketplace with 20k+ products, most of which are written in English. At the same time we support several different languages. This changes the chrome of the site (nav, footer, help text, buttons, everything we control) but leaves all the products in their original language. This resulted in all kinds of duplicate content (pages, titles, descriptions) being detected by SEOMoz and GWT. After doing some research we implemented the on page rel="alternate" hreflang="x", seeing as our situation almost perfectly matched the first use case listed by Google on this page http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077. This ended up not helping at all. Google still reports duplicate titles and descriptions for thousands of products, months after setting this up. We are thinking about changing to the sitemap implementation rel="alternate" hreflang="X", but are not sure if this will work either. Other options we have considered include noindex or blocks with robots.txt when the product language is not the same as the site language. That way the feature is still open to users while removing the duplicate pages for Google. So I'm asking for input on best practice for getting Google to correctly recognize one product, with 6 different language views of that same product. Can anyone help? Examples: (Site in English, Product in English) http://website.com/products/product-72 (Site in Spanish, Product in English) http://website.com/es/products/product-72 (Site in German, Product in English) http://website.com/de/products/product-72 etc...
International SEO | | sedwards0