What are the considerations in setting language within the url of multilingual sites?
-
Is it good practice to use Language-Agnostic + LOCALE=en +LOCALE=fr (as per example below)? If not what is the best way to determine language within a url and why?
For example, today we use:
http://www.canadapost.ca/cpo/mc/default.jsf (goes to language last used by user)
http://www.canadapost.ca/cpo/mc/default.jsf?LOCALE=fr (forces a French-launguage page)
http://www.canadapost.ca/cpo/mc/default.jsf?LOCALE=en (forces and English-language page)
I think you can get tell Google about these parameters through Webmaster tools to help them properly crawl and understand your content, but if we had the opportunity to change it what should we do?
-
I think subfolders accompanied with geotargeting in GWT would work nicely in your case. (canadapost.ca/en/ and canadapost.ca/fr/) but it demands some preparations (301 redirect for example) and it will not be easy technically to change that in your website.
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
-
Unique URLs for each local office 301 to parent site
I have a dentist who has multiple locations and a unique domain for each location. www.DentalCareofLacey.com www.DentalCareofSumner.com www.DentalCareofVashon.com The current plan is to setup 301s to redirect to the parent site (www.atlasdentistry.com/locations/lacey). Would there be any negative impact if we continue to purchase a unique domain for each branch office and just set it as a 301 to the parent site? Does having too many 301 redirects look too spammy to Google?
Technical SEO | | marlattts0 -
Why would this site outrank a Pr2 site with higher domain authority?
I am trying to get a pr2 site to be on top 7 local spot for the keyword Van Nuys Bail bonds but have discovered a site which has barely any back links and is not even a year old on top results. Their backlinks are from lower authority domains than what we have. How could this site be beating a 7 year old pr2 website? The site I'm working on is http://bbbail.com/ The site that is ranking in 5th spot local with pr0 is http://www.vipbailbonds.org/ is it maybe because it is a .org site? Also I notice that all websites in top spots have www, could that be a factor as well?
Technical SEO | | jesse13410 -
Home page URL
Hi, I work on this site: http://www.towerhousetraining.co.uk/about-us. This is the home page URL. Should this be 301'd to: http://www.towerhousetraining.co.uk? I have created a site map, which I submitted to Google Webmaster Tools, which includes these URL's: /about-us, /training-we-offer & /contact-us. There are a total of 3 pages on the website. Webmaster tools has only indexed 2 out of 3 pages. I think this is something to do with the /about-us URL, as when I do a site: search, these pages appear: www.towerhousetraining.co.uk/, /training-we-offer & /contact-us. I am not sure why Google has indexed the home page as www.towerhousetraining.co.uk/ and not /about-us? Is it a bad idea in general not to have your homepage as your root domain? I added a to the homepage, but am wondering if this was the right thing to do? Any help would be appreciated.
Technical SEO | | CWseo0 -
If you are organizing the site structure for an ecommerce site, how would you do it?
Should you use not use slashes and use all dashes or use just a few slashes and the rest with dashes? For example, domain.com/category/brand/product-color-etc OR domain.com/anythinghere-color-dimensions-etc Which structure would you rather go for and why?
Technical SEO | | Zookeeper0 -
How is this site doing this?
http://www.meccabingo.com It shows a splash / promotion page yet you check the cache and it's the real homepage, they are doing this so they don't lose rankings but how are they redirecting users to that but Google is caching the real homepage? is it friendly? thanks!!
Technical SEO | | AdiRste0 -
Crawl reveals hundreds of urls with multiple urls in the url string
The latest crawl of my site revealed hundreds of duplicate page content and duplicate page title errors. When I looked it was from a large number of urls with urls appended to them at the end. For example: http://www.test-site.com/page1.html/page14.html or http://www.test-site.com/page4.html/page12.html/page16.html some of them go on for a hundred characters. I am totally stymied, as are the people at my ISP and the person who talked to me on the phone from SEOMoz. Does anyone know what's going on? Thanks So much for any help you can offer! Jean
Technical SEO | | JeanYates0 -
Does Google pass link juice a page receives if the URL parameter specifies content and has the Crawl setting in Webmaster Tools set to NO?
The page in question receives a lot of quality traffic but is only relevant to a small percent of my users. I want to keep the link juice received from this page but I do not want it to appear in the SERPs.
Technical SEO | | surveygizmo0