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.
Multilingual Ecommerce Product Pages Best Practices
-
Hi Mozzers,
We have a marketplace with 20k+ products, most of which are written in English. At the same time we support several different languages. This changes the chrome of the site (nav, footer, help text, buttons, everything we control) but leaves all the products in their original language.
This resulted in all kinds of duplicate content (pages, titles, descriptions) being detected by SEOMoz and GWT. After doing some research we implemented the on page rel="alternate" hreflang="x", seeing as our situation almost perfectly matched the first use case listed by Google on this page http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077.
This ended up not helping at all. Google still reports duplicate titles and descriptions for thousands of products, months after setting this up. We are thinking about changing to the sitemap implementation rel="alternate" hreflang="X", but are not sure if this will work either. Other options we have considered include noindex or blocks with robots.txt when the product language is not the same as the site language. That way the feature is still open to users while removing the duplicate pages for Google.
So I'm asking for input on best practice for getting Google to correctly recognize one product, with 6 different language views of that same product. Can anyone help?
Examples:
(Site in English, Product in English) http://website.com/products/product-72
(Site in Spanish, Product in English) http://website.com/es/products/product-72
(Site in German, Product in English) http://website.com/de/products/product-72
etc...
-
Hi Gianluca,
Thanks for responding. I took a look at your guide, and I definitely understand the gold standard would be to get everything translated professionally, and provide a completely native experience.
Unfortunately due to our catalog size that would be prohibitively expensive, so I need to think of another solution. It sounds like from your guide that we are doing more harm than good, even with alternate language syntax in place.
Based on your answer, my thought would be to meta noindex any product page where the site language is not the same as the product. That way every page in the index will be 100% localized for potential visitors.
So if its a Spanish product index: site.com/es/product, but meta noindex site.com/de/product, site.com/product, etc.
If we follow that path, does it make sense to remove the alternate language syntax, since all the linked URLs will be no index?
Thanks again for your help.
-
Hi Scott,
sorry to tell you that you're doing International SEO quite bad. No offence, but what you describe is how not to do International SEO.
If you are targeting Spanish end users, you must localize in Spanish everything:
- template elements;
- URLs
- products description
- Titles
- e.v.e.r.y.t.h.i.n.g
It is not just a question of SEO, but of usability too. Just revert the situation: what would be your reaction if you enter in a site, click on the english version and everything is written in Spanish?
Obviously, if you have the spanish version of your all in spanish, that will help a lot ranking for spanish queries.
In order to find an answer to your doubts, I warmly suggest you to read this guide to International SEO I wrote here on SEOmoz few time ago: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-dropping-the-information-dust
Ciao
-
Your answer is conceptually correct, but the implementation not that much.
This kind of URL is not the ideal: http://www.rentalinrome.com/trevifountainapartments_spa/treviluxurypenthouse
The best is to put every language mirror of your multilingual site in a subfolder: i.e. /es/ in the above cited case.
Google, in fact, understands better that the /es/, /de/, /fr/ subfolders are targeting Spanish, German and French, as those are the ISO codes for those languages.
The subfolders way, then, is even more suggested if you are targeting a country, because you can geotarget a subfolder in Google Webmasters Tools.
Finally, a warm suggestion: if you really want to be sure to rank in Russia, then you should think about Yandex SEO... which means:
- Having the site in a .ru domain name (Yandex is biased toward russian domain terminations);
- Have the site in russian.. also the URLs (yours is in english)
-
Hi
For me it is wrong to present a product with the navigation in different languages and the description always in English
We work in travel and i want show you how we work with the same apartment
http://www.rentalinrome.com/trevifountainapartments/treviluxurypenthouse english default language
http://www.rentalinrome.com/trevifountainapartments_ita/treviluxurypenthouse
http://www.rentalinrome.com/trevifountainapartments_spa/treviluxurypenthouse
http://www.rentalinrome.com/fontainedetreviappartements/treviluxurypenthouse
http://www.rentalinrome.com/trevifountainapartments_de/treviluxurypenthouse
http://www.rentalinrome.com/trevifountainapartments_ru/treviluxurypenthouse
we change all, navigation and content
This is the best way for index the same product in different language avoid duplicate content
Ciao
Maurizio
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
-
Problem to get multilingual posts indexed on Google
Last year on June I decided to make my site multi-lingual. The domain is: https://www.dailyblogprofits.com/ The main language English and I added Portuguese and a few posts on Spanish. What happened since then? I started losing traffic from Google and posts on Portuguese are not being indexed. I use WPML plugin to make it multi-lingual and I had Yoast installed. This week I uninstalled Yoast and when I type on google "site:site:dailyblogprofits.com/pt-br" I started seeing Google indexing images, but still not the missing posts. I have around 145 posts on Portuguese, but on Search Console it show only 57 hreflang tags. Any idea what is the problem? I'm willing to pay for an SEO Expert to resolve this problem to me.
International SEO | | Cleber0090 -
Duplicate Content Regarding Translated Pages
If we have one page in English, and another that is translated into Spanish, does google consider that duplicate content? I don't know if having something in a different language makes it different or if it will get flagged. Thanks, Ruben
International SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup1 -
Hreflang tag on every page?
Hello Moz Community, I'm working with a client who has translated their top 50 landing pages into Spanish. It's a large website and we don't have the resources to properly translate all pages at once, so we started with the top 50. We've already translated the content, title tags, URLs, etc. and the content will live in it's own /es-us/ directory. The client's website is set up in a way that all content follows a URL structure such as: https://www.example.com/en-us/. For Page A, it will live in English at: https://www.example.com/en-us/page-a For Page A, it will live in Spanish at https://www.example.com/es-us/page-a ("page-a" may vary since that part of the URL is translated) From my research in the Moz forums and Webmaster Support Console, I've written the following hreflang tags: /> For Page B, it will follow the same structure as Page A, and I wrote the corresponding hreflang tags the same way. My question is, do both of these tags need to be on both the Spanish and English version of the page? Or, would I put the "en-us" hreflang tag on the Spanish page and the "es-us" hreflang tag on the English page? I'm thinking that both hreflang tags should be on both the Spanish and English pages, but would love some clarification/confirmation from someone that has implemented this successfully before.
International SEO | | DigitalThirdCoast0 -
Best practice for Spanish version of English website?
I'm doing an audit for a site that has all of its English pages under the same roof with Spanish pages in Wordpress. It is intended for Chicago, not Mexico. I suspect this is not a good thing, but I only have instinct to rely on here. What is the best practice for having the same website in two languages? http://www.enhancedform.com/ and http://www.enhancedform.com/spanish/
International SEO | | realpatients0 -
Is there any reason to get a massive decrease on indexed pages?
Hi, I'm helping on SEO for a big e-commerce in LatAm and one thing we've experienced during the last months is that our search traffic had reduced and the indexed pages had decreased in a terrible way. The site had over 2 Million indexed pages (which was way too much, since we believe that around 10k would be more than enough to hold the over 6K SKUs) but now this number has decreased to less than 3K in less than 2 months. I've also noticed that most of the results in which the site is still appearing are .pdf or .doc files but not actual content on the website. I've checked the following: Robots (there is no block, you can see that on the image as well) Webmaster Tools Penalties Duplicated content I don't know where else to look for. Can anyone help? Thanks in advance! cpLwX1X
International SEO | | mat-relevance0 -
URL Structure - Homepage, Country and State Pages
Hello, I am creating a website (or websites if best format) that will have state-specific boating license courses for every state in the US, Canada and Australia. I would like the content to be available on the website in English, French and Spanish. I want to be the global leader in providing boat test courses. For the (1) homepage, (2) country pages, and (3) state pages, what is best SEO format I should use for:
International SEO | | Monologix
(a) URL structure
(b) "href lang" code
(c) rel canonical code
(d) will meta content with non-English pages need to also be in the non-English language of that page? Also, what server company do you recommend I host my website with? I am a non-programmer and learning SEO, so any and all help will be greatly appreciated! Thank you very much in advance!!!0 -
What are the best practices for translation of city/state names for international SEO? (ie. New York in English vs. Nueva York in Spanish)
I'm working on international SEO / translation of a global travel site. While we have a global keyword research and translation strategy in process for each market they serve, I've run into a unique question. Overall, we are translating (and localizing) content for each market but aren't sure what to do with location names. Each country/state has cities and locations that have their own dedicated pages. I see three options for these location names (when titling a page and writing content): keep them in English, translate the names in the market languages, or use a combination of the two. The challenge with altering the location names to the market languages is that they are truly not known by those names. Though there are some instances where it may make sense…for instance **New York **in Spanish would be "Nueva York" with **‘**Nueva' being the Spanish translation of ‘new’. There are other instances, where no translation exists. If you’ve had a similar experience I'd love to hear your approach/recommendation.
International SEO | | JonClark150 -
Non US site pages indexed in US Google search
Hi, We are having a global site wide issue with non US site pages being indexed by Google and served up in US search results. Conversley, we have US en pages showing in the Japan Google search results. We currently us IP detect to direct users to the correct regional site but it isn't effective if the users are entering through an incorrect regional page. At the top of each or our pages we have a drop down menu to allow users to manually select their preferred region. Is it possible that Google Bot is crawling these links and indexing these other regional pages as US and not detecting it due to our URL structure? Below are examples of two of our URLs for reference - one from Canada, the other from the US /ca/en/prod4130078/2500058/catalog50008/ /us/en/prod4130078/2500058/catalog20038/ If that is, in fact, what is happening, would setting the links within the drop down to 'no follow' address the problem? Thank you. Angie
International SEO | | Corel0