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
-
Hi Gianluca,
Thanks very much for the helpful response. I agree with your recommendation, linking building across authoritative sites for each of the languages targeted is probably the best way to approach this.
Interestingly, Google Analytics indicates that the vast majority of French (language) visitors are indeed from France, with less than 6% coming from other french speaking countries, so I think it makes sense to register a country top level domain in future to ensure the best chance at competitive visibility here (and in the UK, US).
What you've written about Yandex is very interesting. I myself am new to global SEO so will be doing research. I will also email seomoz to see exactly how best to handle the subfolders.
Thanks again!
-
Hi Vantresca.
I think it is better to clear thing about how International SEO works.
First of all I see a contradiction between your question (when you talk about geo targeting folders or better using cTld), then in this answer here above, when you talk about languages.
Remember: to target a country is not the same as targeting a language speaking population. The example you give (French) is quite clear about this difference.
That means that if you are targeting a language and the people talking that language, the first thing you must discard is the use of an Country level domain name, because that would mean you are targeting the country of the cTld (.es.> Spain - .fr = France...).
But that mean also that you should not have to indicate to Google to geo target any subfolder for any particular country. Ideally every language folder of the site should have to be crawled and shown globally, in order to be found by all the people speaking those language (i.e.: French, Canadians of Quebec, but also all the African nation speaking French..
More over, you cannot use any classic geo targeting signal, as currency, addresses or else.
And, also, you should pay attention to the version of the language used, as - for instance - the french spoken in Quebec is really different from the one spoken in Paris. In that case you should use the most "standardized" version of french, a neutral french.
So... if your site has French, Spanish, English (or Russian I'll talk later), and you want those languages ranks well in every possible country those languages are spoken, the only tactic you have to use is link building, creating as much campaigns as the languages are and not thinking in outreaching sites from France, again taking French as an example, but from sites of every country were French is an official language.
About Russian, my suggestion is to prioritize the migration to an .ru domain if you think to compete in Yandex, as Yandex give a clear preference to Russian country level domains.
Related to your question about if it is possible to create a campaign on a subfolder level, honestly I cannot answer that question, as I've never had that need. But I would address the helpteam regarding this doubt, because they can tell you in details if Roger-bot will crawl your data (as you have requested) or not. You can contact them at help@seomoz.org
-
Hi Kane
We're a Belgian marketing and communicationagency and we're using SEOmoz for multi-language sites. We've got the same question as vantresca.
We'd like to run a campaign for www.masser.be. This site exists both in Dutch (NL) and French (FR). We were also thinking to run seperate campaigns. One for www.masser.be/nl and one for www.masser.be/fr.
Since you were going to defer someone else's opinion in this multi-language questions, we were wondering if you did so already?
Kind regards and thanks already.
Kim
-
Sorry, I can't help much re: multiple languages and how you should be tracking. I would probably track each subfolder as a separate campaign, but I'm going to defer to someone else's opinion on this question, since I don't deal with multi-language sites.
-
Thanks very much for this Kane!
This article is very helpful as I do think geo targeting can be limiting for languages like French that aren't restricted to a single geographic region.
In terms of the campaign set up within SEO moz, is there any point in tracking sub folders separately? I am considering geographic targeting for the russian language version (.com/ru) and it probably makes sense to track this separately for visibility on Yandex, right? What do you think?
-
Google Webmaster Blog posted this recently: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/12/new-markup-for-multilingual-content.html
They don't explicitly say that doing this will result in 'geo-targeting,' but if a site is presented as the "version for users in Mexico, in Spanish", you can bet that Google will likely be showing that content to Google.com.mx searches.
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
-
Why are some regions/countries not indexing correctly?
Hi All, Recently I've added different regions (website.com/se/ etc) to Google search console and pointed them to their relevant countries, but only half are working when I search from a regions IP with a VPN and use the correct Google search ( Google.se etc ). Will this correct over time? or is something else causing them not to be indexed up correctly? Thanks in advance <colgroup><col width="81"><col width="104"></colgroup>
International SEO | | WattbikeSEO
| Country | Appear in SERP 17/12/2018 |
| AU | TRUE |
| CZ | TRUE |
| DK | TRUE |
| HK | TRUE |
| IE | TRUE |
| IT | TRUE |
| KR | TRUE |
| NL | TRUE |
| NZ | TRUE |
| SE | TRUE |
| SG | TRUE |
| US | TRUE |
| ZA | TRUE |
| AE | FALSE |
| AT | FALSE |
| CH | FALSE |
| CN | N/A |
| DE | FALSE |
| EE | FALSE |
| ES | FALSE |
| FI | FALSE |
| FR | FALSE |
| GB | FALSE |
| GR | FALSE |
| JP | FALSE |
| NO | FALSE |
| PL | FALSE |
| RU | FALSE |
| SI | FALSE |
| TR | FALSE |0 -
Switch to Separate URL Configurations for International SEO?
We run an ecommerce website and sell to customers in the US and Canada. We recently realized that the way we serve content to our users isn't Google's recommended way. We use locale-adaptive pages in that some content changes slightly depending on where we think the user is located based on their IP address. But the URL doesn't change. Google's stance on locale-adaptive - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6144055?hl=en&ref_topic=2370587 That being said, the changes are quite minor. It is usually only pricing and currency that changes depending on if we determine the user to be based in Canada or the US. However, I understand that there can be problems related to this configuration because of GoogleBot primarily using a US-based IP. We decided that the best course of action for us is to serve US content as our default content on all of our existing URLs. And Canadian content would be served using new url paths such as: example.com**/en-ca/**product1. All of this would also be configured to use hreflang tags. The problem we have run into is that it is a pretty huge development challenge to reconfigure how the site serves content when we have been using locale-adaptive for over a year. So developer resources would be taken away from other tasks and put toward this one for a relatively long time. Based on this information and the fact that we would like to both rank better in Canada and to follow Google's recommendations, how important would you say this change would be? I realize this isn't a black and white question and it depends a lot on business goals and preferences. However, I need to be able to gauge as best as I can how necessary it is to do this in order to make the decision of whether to do it or not. Any input is greatly appreciated!
International SEO | | westcoastcraig1 -
Which will rank higher: Non-mobile friendly site in native language vs. mobile friendly global site in English?
Hi, we are currently implementing a mobile site, e.g. m.company.com. The global mobile site will only be available in English. We have local subsites of the desktop site, e.g. company.com/fr. The local subsites are not mobile friendly. If a user does a search for a brand term in France, **which site will rank higher in SERPs? **If it will be the global site, is there anything we can do (other than making them mobile friendly) to make the local sites rank higher? Would it be the mobile-friendly site, even though it is only in English, because the local site would be penalized for not being mobile friendly? Or would it be the local site, because Google will give priority to the fact that it's in French, which matches the language of the person searching?
International SEO | | jennifer.new0 -
Subdomains or subfolders for language specific sites?
We're launching an .org.hk site with English and Traditional Chinese variants. As the local population speaks both languages we would prefer not to have separate domains and are deciding between subdomains and subfolders. We're aware of the reasons behind generally preferring folders, but many people, including moz.com, suggest preferring subfolders to subdomains with the notable exception of language-specific sites. Does this mean subdomains should be preferred for language specific sites, or just that they are okay? I can't find any rationale to this other than administrative simplification (e.g. easier to set up different analytics / hosting), which in our case is not an issue. Can anyone point me in the right direction?
International SEO | | SOS_Children0 -
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 -
Does the location of my Domain Registrar affect SEO?
Does the location of my Domain Registrar affect SEO? For example, if my hosting company is in the U.S., but the domain registrar is overseas. Also, is it better to have both services be met by one company?
International SEO | | greenfoxone0 -
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 -
How can I view Google.com SERPs from outside the US?
If I go to Google.com I get redirected back to Google.co.uk and search results have a UK bias. I'm trying to research the US market and have a hazy recolection of Rand demonstrating how you can add a few characters to the google.co.uk url to see US results - just can't remember what video I saw it in. Any ideas? Thanks a lot
International SEO | | trbaldwin0