Should I Use Two Domains for Multi Language Sites?
-
I have an immigration attorney that wants a website in English and another in Spanish. We're going to have some of the website content from the English site translated via a translator to make it true, conversation spanish (automatic translators are good, but not perfect, and we want perfect). So my question is do you think we should use two different domains (englishsite.com, spanishsite.com), a subdomain (spanishsite.englishsite.com) or maybe just a separate section of the regular site (englishsite.com/spanishcontent)? My thought would be either a subdomain or a separate section so that we're not splitting PR.
-
If you want to rank for your site in both languages and have them crawled you need to create separate pages for each language. Read here: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/multilingual-seo/19903/
If you use an auto detect function your content will not cater good to your audience or Google.
-
Well not everyone might have their language set on their browser either. Just add links on the top so they can pick a language. Along with auto responsive and auto detect language for the outsiders
-
That's a good idea, and I considered that, but the problem is that my client is in Ohio and most of the spanish speaking people that are contacting him are also in Ohio, so it's a bit difficult to narrow it down that way. Maybe we could make it so that we can detect their browser language and then respond accordingly?
-
I personally would do some auto responsive design to detect the location of the user and display the language of choice. Here is some good practices according to Google
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=182192#1
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
-
Reason for reducing site authority domain?
Hi;
Technical SEO | | 5mizo
I have a website that had an authoritative domain of 10 but today it has reached 5. I wanted to know what the reason for these changes was.
No backlinks from my site have disappeared and even more, but today my authoritative domain has reached 5 authoritative domain.
Can you guide my servant? My website to troubleshoot : bonianservice.com Thank you very much mxyv_untitled-2.jpg0 -
Could using our homepage Google +1's site wide harm our website?
Hello Moz! We currently have the number of Google +1's for our homepage displaying on all pages of our website. Could this be viewed as black hat/manipulative by Google, and result in harming our website? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | TheDude0 -
Old domain still being crawled despite 301s to new domain
Hi there, We switched from the domain X.com to Y.com in late 2013 and for the most part, the transition was successful. We were able to 301 most of our content over without too much trouble. But when when I do a site:X.com in Google, I still see about 6240 URLs of X listed. But if you click on a link, you get 301d to Y. Maybe Google has not re-crawled those X pages to know of the 301 to Y, right? The home page of X.com is shown in the site:X.com results. But if I look at the cached version, the cached description will say :This is Google's cache of Y.com. It is a snapshot of the page as it appeared on July 31, 2014." So, Google has freshly crawled the page. It does know of the 301 to Y and is showing that page's content. But the X.com home page still shows up on site:X.com. How is the domain for X showing rather than Y when even Google's cache is showing the page content and URL for Y? There are some other similar examples. For instance, you would see a deep URL for X, but just looking at the <title>in the SERP, you can see it has crawled the Y equivalent. Clicking on the link gives you a 301 to the Y equivalent. The cached version of the deep URL to X also shows the content of Y.</p> <p>Any suggestions on how to fix this or if it's a problem. I'm concerned that some SEO equity is still being sequestered in the old domain.</p> <p>Thanks,</p> <p>Stephen</p></title>
Technical SEO | | fernandoRiveraZ1 -
Windows Acces used for e-commerce site - help needed
Hello everybody, I am working on this e-commerce website built on windows access and it's a nightmare to change the html content on it.has anyone used it before? It doesn't allow me to change the content for the html tags even though it should and i don't have a clue about what to do. Thanks oscar
Technical SEO | | PremioOscar0 -
One site per location or all under and umbrella site?
I am working on a project where we are re-branding lots (100+) existing local business under one national brand. I am wondering what we should do with their existing websites, they are generally fairly poor and will need re-designing to match the new brand but may have some residual links? 301 redirect the URL to the national site, e.g. nationalsite.com/localbusinessA? If so what should I look out for? Do I need to specifically redirect any pages that have links to them to the same pages on the new site? Or should I give them a new standalone website that they link back to the national brand site? More than likely this will be hosted on the same server and CMS as the main site just the URL will remain Do I need to make sure that any old URL's that had links to them are 301'd to the new pages? Many thanks for you advice.
Technical SEO | | BadgerToo0 -
Does anyone use Ning (Custom social site)?
We just got a custom Ning site developed and the second we moved it to our domain, we lost almost all of our rankings in Google. So, we sign up for a SEOMoz Pro account and within a week we see that we have over 6,000 errors and warnings on our site. Duplicate content, duplicate page titles and pages with too many links. Is anyone using Ning and successfully maintaining 1st page rankings in Google? Seems to me that we need hundreds of fixes and modifications in the code of our site to fix all of these errors and get Google to take our penalizations off.
Technical SEO | | danlok0 -
Parking Domains
I currently have a website domain.com.au, an American branch of the company who own domain.com are currently having their site built and want to forward there domain.com to domain.com.au while construction is taking place. Are there any negative effects to parking the domain.com on my domain.com.au? What is the best method to do this without causing any problems for my domain.com.au?
Technical SEO | | Pork0 -
Google Confusion: Two Sites and a 301 Redirect.
Hi, We have a client who just sprang a new project on us. As always, they went ahead and did some stuff before bringing us into the loop! (oh the joy of providing SEO services!) Anyway, i'm pretty swamped right now and need some extra brains on this. Basically the client had www.examplesiteA.com online for many years (an affiliate site which had built up a strong brand in the industry). They have now decided to turn this affiliate site into a full blown service platform and so with the new site being built they 301'd the whole thing over to www.examplesiteB.com - this is where they want all the old affiliate content to be hosted. So essentially examplesiteA.com is now examplesiteB.com and a new site is being placed on examplesiteA.com - still with me? So this has all happened and a brand new website is on examplesiteA.com and the old examplesiteA is now sitting exactly as it used to, but on the examplesiteB domain. The 301 redirect has been removed and the new examplesiteA seems to have been crawled, but the homepage is not indexed. When you search for examplesiteA, examplesiteB is the top result. Now they are similar domain names and to be fair I have very little data at this point i.e. I don't know when the 301 redirect was removed and it maybe that this all fixes itself with time. How is link equity effected now that examplesiteA.com was 301 redirected to examplesiteB.com and cached in this way, but now the 301 redirect has been removed and does not exist? Would link juice have been diluted throughout the process? Obviously if we had been in on all this before anything was implemented we would have done things differently. Interested to hear what others would do coming in at this point. Thanks and look forward to the advice!
Technical SEO | | MarcLevy0