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.
What SEO considerations for multiple languages on a single page?
-
I am working on a language teaching site for Chinese speakers learning English. I consider myself above average when it comes to basic SEO issues, but all I know here is that Google doesn't like multiple languages on a single page.
Without getting into too many details, both Chinese and English text will appear on the same page with links, tags, phonetic spellings, etc.
I'm hoping someone here knows the science about using the lang="zh" xml:lang="zh" attributes within text and the effects on ranking for text within the declarations. And it'd be great if there was clarification on the link juice passed using the hreflang attribute for both internal and external links. Also, of course, any info on using both English and Chinese characters in the URL would be most helpful. A heads up on any other language specific SEO issues would also be much appreciated.
My goal is to get the most out of both languages per page in terms of ranking.
-
I thought about a subdomain, but I think it would complicate things from an SEO standpoint. From what I've learned, a subdomain here would get treated as a separate domain and send link juice to an English page that wouldn't be accessible to visitors direct (only within another Chinese page as a lightbox). I'm sure there's a cleaner way to do this.
What I'm looking for is ranking effects of using the Lang element or ATTLIST declaration with lang element to identify various languages on the same page. Or if there is any other way to let search engines know I'm using multiple languages on a single page, it'd be a super time saver.
Thanks for all your input so far!
-
Right. If both languages are to be that dominant it could justify the use of a subdomain for the English weighted portions, but it would take some clever coding to get it right.
-
Thanks for the input Ryan. My challenge here is that both languages will be used on nearly all pages site wide. I'll look deeper into the JS lightbox method, but my initial thoughts are that the html would appear in multiple places on the site, and I'm not sure how search engines will treat an English document inside a Chinese document. Of course my priority is usability, but as I go through the design process, I was just hoping to find a way to get the search engines to count content in both languages toward SEO ranking.
-
Since it's native Chinese speakers I'd weight everything towards that priority, i.e. title tags begin in Chinese and then have their English translation. Obviously your going to run into problems with length there, but in other on page areas you should be fine. If it's only one page I'd also lean towards choosing zh as your language setting. One strategy that you could pursue however would be to code two separate, but duplicate pages, one in English, the other in Chinese that are on separate subdomains then as someone goes through the page they could study flash card style with translations being pulled from the other subdomain via a lightbox or something similar. It would be difficult and more work, but you'd also have more ability to really strengthen results, one for English and one for Chinese. Bilingual pages aren't my specialty though. I think a French / Canadian SEO could add some valuable input here as they have English and French as dual official language. Pinging someone from there could be useful, especially in a place like Montreal. Hopefully my above suggestion helps somewhat. Sorry I can't add more input about the science.
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 anyone know the linking of hashtags on Wix sites does it negatively or postively impact SEO. It is coming up as an error in site crawls 'Pages with 404 errors' Anyone got any experience please?
Does anyone know the linking of hashtags on Wix sites does it negatively or positively impact SEO. It is coming up as an error in site crawls 'Pages with 404 errors' Anyone got any experience please? For example at the bottom of this blog post https://www.poppyandperle.com/post/face-painting-a-global-language the hashtags are linked, but they don't go to a page, they go to search results of all other blogs using that hashtag. Seems a bit of a strange approach to me.
Technical SEO | | Mediaholix0 -
Indexed pages
Just started a site audit and trying to determine the number of pages on a client site and whether there are more pages being indexed than actually exist. I've used four tools and got four very different answers... Google Search Console: 237 indexed pages Google search using site command: 468 results MOZ site crawl: 1013 unique URLs Screaming Frog: 183 page titles, 187 URIs (note this is a free licence, but should cut off at 500) Can anyone shed any light on why they differ so much? And where lies the truth?
Technical SEO | | muzzmoz1 -
Getting high priority issue for our xxx.com and xxx.com/home as duplicate pages and duplicate page titles can't seem to find anything that needs to be corrected, what might I be missing?
I am getting high priority issue for our xxx.com and xxx.com/home as reporting both duplicate pages and duplicate page titles on crawl results, I can't seem to find anything that needs to be corrected, what am I be missing? Has anyone else had a similar issue, how was it corrected?
Technical SEO | | tgwebmaster0 -
Multiple H1 Tags on Page
Can having multiple H1 tags on a webpage be detrimental to its rankings?
Technical SEO | | AubbiefromAubenRealty0 -
Why is Google Webmaster Tools showing 404 Page Not Found Errors for web pages that don't have anything to do with my site?
I am currently working on a small site with approx 50 web pages. In the crawl error section in WMT Google has highlighted over 10,000 page not found errors for pages that have nothing to do with my site. Anyone come across this before?
Technical SEO | | Pete40 -
SEO value of InDesign pages?
Hi there, my company is exploring creating an online magazine built with Adobe's InDesign toolset. If we proceeded with this, could we make these pages "as spiderable" as normal html/css webpages? Or are we limited to them being less spiderable, or not at all spiderable?
Technical SEO | | TheaterMania1 -
Product Pages Outranking Category Pages
Hi, We are noticing an issue where some product pages are outranking our relevant category pages for certain keywords. For a made up example, a "heavy duty widgets" product page might rank for the keyword phrase Heavy Duty Widgets, instead of our Heavy Duty Widgets category page appearing in the SERPs. We've noticed this happening primarily in cases where the name of the product page contains an at least partial match for the desired keyword phrase we want the category page to rank for. However, we've also found isolated cases where the specified keyword points to a completely irrelevent pages instead of the relevant category page. Has anyone encountered a similar issue before, or have any ideas as to what may cause this to happen? Let me know if more clarification of the question is needed. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | ShawnHerrick0 -
Does the use of sliders for text-on-page, effects SEO in any way?
The concept of using text sliders in an e-commerce site as a solution to placing SEO text above or in between product and high on ages, seems too good to be true.... or is it? How would a text slider for FAQ or other on-page text done with sliding paragraphs (similar but not this specific code- http://demo.tutorialzine.com/2010/08/dynamic-faq-jquery-yql-google-docs/faq.html) might effect text-on-page SEO. Does Google consider it hidden text? Would there be any other concerns or best practices with this design concept? faq.html
Technical SEO | | RKanfi0