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
-
International website sharing with .com/.au/.uk
I have a small business in the United States and would like to copy our main website for my international partners. My website is a .com. I think that their domains will end in their country codes: .au and .uk. We are open to using different domains. We plan to share blog articles and other content, but do not wish to be penalized for duplication. I have tried to read articles on this topic, but am unfamiliar with a lot of the terms. Is there any way to do this simply? Many thanks, Steph
International SEO | | essential_steph0 -
GSC is not showing URLs in Regional Language Characters in Search Analytics
Hi, We have a regional language sub-domain, which has the URI in the regional language characters (Hindi). While looking at the Search Analytics data in GSC, we get all the URLs in ASCII format. To resolve this issue, we even encoded the characters in UTF-8, by adding the following in the of the page: However, we are still getting illegible URLs in search console. It would be really great if someone could help me out with this issue. Thanks!
International SEO | | Starcom_Search0 -
International Sites and Duplicate Content
Hello, I am working on a project where have some doubts regarding the structure of international sites and multi languages.Website is in the fashion industry. I think is a common problem for this industry. Website is translated in 5 languages and sell in 21 countries. As you can imagine this create a huge number of urls, so much that with ScreamingFrog I cant even complete the crawling. Perhaps the UK site is visible in all those versions http://www.MyDomain.com/en/GB/ http://www.MyDomain.com/it/GB/ http://www.MyDomain.com/fr/GB/ http://www.MyDomain.com/de/GB/ http://www.MyDomain.com/es/GB/ Obviously for SEO only the first version is important One other example, the French site is available in 5 languages and again... http://www.MyDomain.com/fr/FR/ http://www.MyDomain.com/en/FR/ http://www.MyDomain.com/it/FR/ http://www.MyDomain.com/de/FR/ http://www.MyDomain.com/es/FR/ And so on...this is creating 3 issues mainly: Endless crawling - with crawlers not focusing on most important pages Duplication of content Wrong GEO urls ranking in Google I have already implemented href lang but didn't noticed any improvements. Therefore my question is Should I exclude with "robots.txt" and "no index" the non appropriate targeting? Perhaps for UK leave crawable just English version i.e. http://www.MyDomain.com/en/GB/, for France just the French version http://www.MyDomain.com/fr/FR/ and so on What I would like to get doing this is to have the crawlers more focused on the important SEO pages, avoid content duplication and wrong urls rankings on local Google Please comment
International SEO | | guidoampollini0 -
Footer pages on international sites
Hi guys, i have a question about footer indexed pages like about us, frequently questions, press or ads with us, among others. I'd like to put the same page in our website of .com.mx but i don't know how because i think it will be duplicate content. should i create new content for these pages? Thanks, J
International SEO | | pompero990 -
Different urls for the homepage on an international website
Hi! I was wondering what would be the best strategy to solve duplicated content generated by the homepage and its differents URLS This is an international website. Now it only has one language working: Spanish, but the url structure is already ready to work with the language approach So we have now www.brand.com -> Spanish Homepage (canonical www.brand.com/es)
International SEO | | teconsite
www.brand.com/es -> Spanish Homepage (canonical www.brand.com/es)
www.brand.com/index.php -> Spanish Homepage (canonical www.brand.com/es) I would like to know if this is the correct approach of if we should add 301 redirects instead of canonical. Let's image that they want to active the /en language, so they will have www.brand.com
www.brand.com/index.php
www.brand.com/es
www.brand.com/en now what? I image they have to use hreflang, but I am a little lost with how this should work. 301? canonical? hreflang? Could you help me? Thank you! Victoria0 -
Ranking well internationally, usage of hreflang, duplicate country content
I'm trying to wrap my head around various options when it comes to international SEO, specifically how to rank well in countries that share a language, and the risk of duplicate content in these cases. We have a chance to start from scratch because we're switching to a new e-commerce platform, and we were looking into using hreflang. Let's assume an example of a .com webshop that targets both Austria and Germany. One option is to include both language and region in the URL, and mark these as such using hreflang: webshop.com/de-de/german-language-content (with hreflang de-de)
International SEO | | DocdataCommerce
webshop.com/de-at/german-language-content (with hreflang de-at) Another option would be to only include the language in the URL, not the region, and let Google figure out the rest: webshop.com/de/german-language-content (with hreflang de) Which would be better? The risk of inserting a country, of course, is that you're introducing duplicate content, especially since for webshops there are usually only minor differences in content (pricing, currency, a word here and there). If hreflang is an effective means to make sure that visitors from each country get the correct URL from the search engines, I don't see any reason not to use this way. But if search engines get it wrong, users will end up in the wrong page and will have to switch country, which could result in conversion loss. Also, if you only use language in the URL, is it useful at all to use hreflang? Aren't engines perfectly able to recognize language already? I don't mention ccTLDs here because most of the time we're required to use a .com domain owned by our customer. But if we did, would that be much better? And would it still be useful to use hreflang then? webshop.de/german-language-content (with hreflang de-de)
webshop.at/german-language-content (with hreflang de-at) Michel Hendriks
Docdata Commerce0 -
Best Practice for International Website with Two Versions
I have a client in the medical industry, and the company's product has been approved in various countries in Europe yet is awaiting approval in the US. That means we can share certain information in some countries that we cannot share in the US. Therefore, we plan to use an initial landing page that will ask what country the user is in (using a drop-down list to choose from if not located in the US) and then push him or her to the appropriate version of the site. Here is my question: What is the best way to ensure search engines can crawl the site beyond this landing page? Thanks for your time.
International SEO | | mollykathariner_ms0 -
Same website in different countries, best practices for SEO?
Hey Guys, I have read several similar questions regarding mine, but none seem to truly cover my question. Basically, we have a company named Junair. We created the website for the company here in Australia (http://www.junair.com.au). As can be seen throughout the page, it mentions that it caters for both Australia and NZ (NZ has its own phone number). It does ok in the rankings at the moment, but rankings will continue to rise in the future once more links are getting picked up. Now however, the Junair team in NZ purchased the NZ domain http://www.junair.co.nz and redirected it to the Australian page. No matter which page you visit on the NZ URL, the URL will never change, and neither will the page title. They have now contacted us and asked to perform SEO on the NZ domain so the NZ domain would show up in searches on Google NZ. At the moment, when searching for "Junair" on google.co.nz, the Australian domain is coming up. How could I change this so the NZ URL would show instead? And what would be the best practices to perform SEO on the NZ URL, should I just create links pointing to http://www.junair.co.nz ? Thank you, Roderic
International SEO | | Michael-Goode0