French Canadian Website and French Language URLs
-
Hello,
One of my clients has a question on a new Quebec, Canada version of their website. The website content and copy is in the French Canadian language, but the IT Director has asked if, for the purpose of SEO, should the URLs be in French as well?
So, this questions has two parts...
For SEO, should the URL's be in French or left in English, to avoid crawl errors?
For visitor UX, is there any reason to have them in French versus English?
-
So, was your hierarchy like this?
GER = www.domain.de = German language and URLs version of www.domain.com
FRA = www.domain.fr = French language and URLs version of www.domain.com
...and so on and so on?
-
So, this client has this current setup...
USA = www.domain.com in English
CAN = www.domain.ca in English
FR CAN = quebec.domain.ca = which based on this consideration, should be have URL's in French.
So, how would one handle accent marks and such in the URL?
We are using the Ektron CMS, which eventually, all the sites will live there and country specific domains can be redirected to a language and locale specific version of the website.
-
So, this client has this current setup...
USA = www.domain.com in English
CAN = www.domain.ca in English
FR CAN = quebec.domain.ca = which based on this consideration, should be have URL's in French.
So, how would one handle accent marks and such in the URL?
We are using the Ektron CMS, which eventually, all the sites will live there and country specific domains can be redirected to a language and locale specific version of the website.
-
We made 3 or 4 versions of our last clients site, cause the had German, French, English, and Chiniese, and what we did was a Umbraco CMS, so the client could do a version of all. That would be the best and safest rout. May be labor intensive, but smart thought process.
-
Well, is it content only available to French-Canadian's? For example, would your company's services be relevant to somebody from, say, Dallas, Texas in the US? Is any of your services relevant to English speaking people? And if so, what is the percentage?
Build your site for your clients/customers/users, and whatever makes sense to them. If only French speaking/reading people will be visiting your site (for the most part), then build everything in French (including URL's), as it will be legible. For the same reason you a Hindu site might not be relevant to you, regardless of their services (taking a stab in the dark that you might not know Hindu; I apologize if I'm wrong
You know what I mean? Bottom-line: build for your users and what is going to generate the greatest ROI.
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
-
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
International SEO | | mlehr0 -
SEO Strategy for international website with similar content
Hello, If a company is in different countries and has same content in most of the countries does it hurt SEO? For Ex. fibaro.com is the website that I am researching and I have seen the indexed pages to be about 40,000 however there is not much content on it. On further inspection I noticed that for every country the sub folder is different. So for us it will be fibaro.com/us/motion-sensor and for Europe fibaro.com/en/motion-sensor. Now both of these pages have same content on it and the company is in 86 countries so imagine the amount of duplicate content it has. Does anybody have any ideas on what should be an ideal way to approach this? Thanks
International SEO | | Harveyspecter0 -
International websites : hreflang
Hi, i'm looking for good examples with 'href lang' tag (rel="alternate" hreflang="x") Have you examples of websites with this tag? Thanks D.
International SEO | | android_lyon0 -
Translating URLs worth it?
My company has content in 23 different languages in 30+ countries. We translate page content but we don't translate URLs. I am trying to figure out whether it would be worth the considerable extra overhead to translate the URLs as well. I'd really appreciate hearing the thoughts of the Moz community. Thanks in advance!
International SEO | | Logi0 -
Best domain for spanish language site targeting ALL spanish territories?
hi, we're have a strong .com domain and are looking to launch a site for spanish speakers (ie latin america + spain). we already have various subdirectories for some foreign language sites (eg. ourdomain.co.uk, us.ourdomain.com, ca.ourdomain.com, ourdomainchina.com, ourdomainindia.com etc) we already have a B2B site ourdomain.com-es which will remain the same. I'm thinking best practice would be to launch translated copy for the following: ourdomain.com/es ourdomain.com/cl ourdomain.com/mx ourdomain.com/pt etc etc firstly is this the best option? secondly, i'm really interested to hear whether there is a less time/resource intensive route that would give us visibility in ALL spanish speaking territories? Also - if we go with just one of the above (eg ourdomain.com/cl) how likely are we to get traction in other spanish speaking territories? any help much appreciated!
International SEO | | KevinDunne0 -
Http://us.burberry.com/: Big traffic change for top URL (error 593f1ceb2d67)
Please forgive duplicating this question on the SEOMoz & Webmaster Tools forum but I'm hoping to hit both audiences with this question... A few days ago I noticed that our US homepage (us.burberry.com) had dropped from PR5 to PR0, and the page has been deindexed by Google. After checking Webmaster Tools I also received the following message: http://us.burberry.com/: Big traffic change for top URL April 2, 2012Search results clicks for http://us.burberry.com/ have decreased significantly.Message ID: 593f1ceb2d67.We're not doing any link building at all (we've enough on-site issues to deal with). The only changes I have made are adding Google Analytics to the website, uploading sitemaps via Webmaster Tools (it's not linked to from robots.txt yet), and setting the burberry.com and www.burberry.com geo-location settings to 'unlisted' (we want uk.burberry.com appearing in the UK results, us.burberry.com appearing in the US results etc rather than www.burberry.com).I've reversed the geo-location settings but I doubt this would have caused this. We've duplicate copies of our homepage (such as us.burberry.com/store//) from typos in inbound links (and bad programming that allows them to work rather than 404'ing) but I don't think any of this is new. What I don't understand is (a) why this is happening now and (b) why is this just affecting our US homepage? We've ~40 different duplicates of the homepage (us, uk, ca, pt, ro, sk etc etc) so why is the US site being affected and not the others? Does anyone know if this is due to an algorithm change by Google or something else all together? Background:Our website www.burberry.com has 46 subdomains such as uk.burberry.com, ca.burberry.com and us.burberry.com. There is a lot of duplicate content on each subdomain (including basic things like tracking parameters in URLs) and across subdomains (uk.burberry.com/store & us.burberry.com/store are exactly the same), there's very little text on the site (its nearly all images), as well as poor redirects, inaccessible content (AJAX/Flash) and a whole host of basic SEO things that aren't being done correctly. I've joined the company in the last few months and have started addressing these issues but I've got a LOT of work to do yet.One thing that we have in our favour is a link profile that is as clean and natural as they come - there was only ever one link building campaign performed (which was before my time) and I had all of those links removed as soon as I joined the company.Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks for your timeDean RoweEdit: us.burberry.com 301 redirects to us.burberry.com/store/ as explained on the webmaster tools forum, but I don't believe this is the cause as its the same across all subdomains.
International SEO | | FashionLux0 -
SEO for Subdomains for different languages .com/fr, .com/es
Hi All, I was wondering how best to to approach optimisation of a site that exists on a single .com domain, but has different subfolders for different languages. The site is a .com and it has subfolders for French, Spanish, Russian and English. The business is situated in France and the vast majority of clients are French and English speakers. I've read that it's possible to geo target these subfolders using webmaster tools however I believe this is an inferior method of optimisation than having tld's. Just wondered if anyone had experience of htis and could provide any advice ? As they won't be rebuilding the site for another year or so I wondered if there were any quick wins? My second question is to do with how best to set these campaigns up within SEO Moz. would it be better to track at a subdomain or subfolder leverl (for different languages)? If someone could advise I would greatly appreciate it! Thanks, vantresca
International SEO | | vanvallejo0 -
Site with multiple languages
We are building a Joomla site for a customer that has an USA division and a South American division (english and spanish). The products and services are the same. I am trying to understand the best posible way to architect the site. 1- Do I create 1 site with duplicate pages in different languages? Does Google recognize that it is duplicate content if different languages are used? 2- Do I create seperate sub domains for each language? 3- Should I just use Google translate to translate the pages as required? The problem here is that each site has a different geographic target. any other alternatives?
International SEO | | brantwadz0