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?
-
Hi there,
Great comments.
What language would/should you use for the homepage? And for what reason?
I mean many visitors will probably visit the site through the homepage regardless of their language..
I guess it won't be an option to show them their preferred language on the homepage (usability and conversion issues is what I have in mind also)
Cheers,
Christian
-
As I stated, make sure to use a proper translation service in your efforts, and not any automated translation. They never really get tone, punctuality, etc etc right in native languages (in my book/rant above)
As well - make sure to ADD the Meta feature on each of your pages in the sub-folder (or subdomains) you use like -
And you can use this link resource to find the language code for this feature.
[http://www.seoconsultants.com/meta-tags/language](Meta Language Tags "http://www.seoconsultants.com/meta-tags/language")
-
For me the translation is the easy part. I just need to make sure that I am architecting the system the best way possible from the start. would hate to have to come back and decide to change it all up because I didnt think of something.
thanks for your comments!
-
Dan - great shout on using a proper translator rather than Google translate
-
I'm not a big fan of breaking language sites into sub-domains because you break the value of the link structure and link juice in the domain. So for every single language you break out into a sub-domain - you then end up having to build more links to the sub-domains.
Each SEO is different and has difference experience, tactics and strategy from testing and previous work on sites. Sub-folders have been more successful for me in work than sub-domains in terms of rankings and language (MSEO) techniques.
Cheers! Rob
-
Hi Brant,
What you are talking about is Multilingual SEO processes. There are a few ways you can go about doing this.
You can either go with:
A) go with the following setups for the domain with regards to the site URL/sub-folder structure.
www.mysite.com (english)
www.mysite.com/sp/ (spanish)
www.mysite.com/fr/ (french)
www.mysite.com/de/ (german)
etc, etc, etc..
Or:
B) Or, you can also go the route of picking up the same domains name with needed country level extensions that are part of that country (like .ca for canada, .de for germany, .com for USA) etc, etc.
I prefer option A for many reasons, but everyone has their preferences
If you go with A. Keep the domain setup the same and build /folders/ with duplicates of the site pages that are target focused in the target language.
If you go the route of using sub-folders - you will need to inquire about setting up geo-location services at the domain/hosting level (through IP detection)
If going with the sub-folders - don't forget (from a user and experience perspective) on the site to make sure to allow users to 'choose' which element/language manually from the sites' homepage, if offering more than 1-2 languages (expansion) if you go to 3-4 or 5 versions.
This process is very intensive, and needs to be done carefully. You want to use professional services for translation, as Google Translate, or other online services aren't always accurate in sentence structure.Google does not recommend automatic translations.
If you go this route, you will also need to redo a complete KW audit from a search engine optimization perspective, so you have the RIGHT keywords that people use for that market (products), in their own languages. English isn't always a market parallel when languages are involved. Keyword translation is very important here to be successul with customers and target search.
** Using sub-domains can also be done - but sub-domains are considered to be independent domains by Google and therefore don't pass link juice' and value for inbound links across the whole site. Sub folder structures are best for allowing link 'juice' from link building effort' to be passed to the entire site.
If you go with A) - because you are using /folders/ for each of the domains you want to target for each users language. This type of setup is less expensive as well (cost of purchasing more domains, hosting etc)
Try to avoid using geo-location at the hosting level (from an IP address perspective) as it isn't always the best option for your user experience. Giving users the option to choose the language they want to use/see. Allowing users to choose the language they want to view the site in, will help them. Just becuase someone visits a site from the U.S - doesn't mean they are English (they could be Spanish, Chinese, Russian etc) and want the option to choose the language of the site you are promoting.
Remember to use UTF8 for non english language character encoding (on pages, URL's etc)
Presenting sites in multiple languages isn't 'duplicate content' when breaking it out into various /folders and then languages.
*** This is also great user experience and if done properly can help you retain the visitor and convert them into a customer/client as you have taken the time to build out information in their native tongue.
A couple of good articles on MSEO (Multilingual SEO) to help you along. With this, you could probably dig for more information too.
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/multilingual-seo/19903/
Sorry for the long book of information and links! Ideas just kept coming to me while I was writing!
Cheers, Rob
-
Hey Brant!
I'd go with the sub-domain route like es.yoursits.com and have the Spanish pages right there. In my experience, I've created multi-language sites and not run into duplicate content issues.
Secondly, Google translate does a kind of dictionary translation that may not read so well by your target audience. If at all possible, find someone who can translate the pages for you. Spanish is a common language so you may know someone who can do that for you. If this isn't the case, you could try the url below, I've used this provider before and had good results. May not be viable if you have a lot of text to translate though.
http://fiverr.com/newwealth/do-small-english-to-spanish-translations
Hope this helps,
Dan
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
-
Moving from single domain to multiple CCTLDs
Hi, I have a website targeting 3 markets (and therefor 3 languages). I was currently using a single domain with each market being targeted in the following format: www.website.com/pl
International SEO | | cellydy
www.website.com/de
www.website.com/hu It's clear to me by looking at organic results, that in my industry (Real Estate) Google is putting a large emphasis on local businesses and local domains. Top 10 organic results for all my keywords in all markets have country specific CCTLDs. I decided to migrate from a single domain strategy to a multi domain strategy. I own the domains. The new structure is www.website.com/pl -> www.website.pl
www.website.com/de -> www.website.de
www.website.com/hu -> www.website.hu All the website have been added to google search console and 301 redirects are in place and working correctly. The pages are all interlinked and have rel=alternate to each other. The sitemaps are all done correctly. My question is how do I tell Google about this. The change of address feature only works for changing one domain to one other domain. It's been a week and the old www.website.com domain is still showing up (even considering 301 redirects). Or do I just need to be patient and wait it out? Any tips?0 -
Is it advisable to show additionally also English ciity names of American cities in website versions of non-western languages such as Chinese, Japanese etc?
To my understanding in many Asian languages city names are transcribed as they sound and this can cause confusion especially in the case of lesser known American city names. So I was planning to put in our international website versions (Chinese, Japanese, Korean etc. ) the English name in brackets after the translated city name in meta title and H1.
International SEO | | lcourse
However when I checked Tripadvisor and Booking.com I noticed that they do not show the English city name anywhere on their Asian language versions. Any thoughts?
Would you recommend to put the English city name in brackets after the translated city name or may it rather hurt our ranking and traffic?0 -
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 -
International Sites - Sitemaps, Robots & Geolocating in WMT
Hi Guys, I have a site that has now been launched in the US having originally just been UK. In order to accommodate this, the website has been set-up using directories for each country. Example: domain.com/en-gb domain.com/en-us As the site was originally set-up for UK, the sitemap, robots file & Webmaster Tools account were added to the main domain. Example: domain.com/sitemap.xml domain.com/robots.txt The question is does this now need changing to make it specific for each country. Example: The sitemap and robots.txt for the UK would move to: domain.com/en-gb/sitemap.xml domain.com/en-gb/robots.txt and the US would have its own separate sitemap and robots.txt. Example : domain.com/en-us/sitemap.xml domain.com/en-us/robots.txt Also in order to Geolocate this in WMT would this need to be done for each directory version instead of the main domain? Currently the WMT account for the UK site is verified at www.domain.com, would this need reverifying at domain.com/en-gb? Any help would be appreciated! Thanks!
International SEO | | CarlWint0 -
Researching (and launching a site within) a foreign language market
Morning peeps, A client wants to clone their website for a foreign language market, obviously swapping all English content for whichever language/market they're looking to target. Any advice on how to research a foreign market (when I only speak English), or perhaps any pitfalls to look out for or advice you might have with a launch like this? thanks
International SEO | | Martin_S0 -
International SEO: best practices for local variants of the same language?
We are translating our site into 17 different languages, including local variants of the same language (i.e. Mexican Spanish and Spain Spanish, Canadian English and British English, etc). Should we add all of these local variants to our site? We don't have the marketing / link building budget (or business need) to put these all on separate ccTLDs, so we are using country-specific subfolders instead (example.com/es/). The translations will be of exceptional quality. Our main goal is to pull in some additional traffic from these translations. If we add these local variants, do you think we can expect to see traffic from these different countries (additional traffic from Canada, England, etc)? Any advice / input would be appreciated.
International SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Reciprocal Links between my own sites ?
Is is ok to have Reciprocal Links between sites you really own ? We have a website that has been regionalized to 5 countries, using 5 different domains. The content is exclusive for the country but the keywords used might be similar. We have all the domains under the same Analytics account and all of them share the same Adsense code. Can I be penalized by Google for making reciprocal links between them ? Is something usefull for improving the SEO rank or I should avoid doing it ? Thanks in advance
International SEO | | martincad0