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
-
Changed domains, saw significant drop in domain authority
Hello, A little over a month ago we switched our domain from A to B. The original was .com and the new one is at a .tech for good measure. We have meticulously done 301 redirects page by page but there has been a massive drop in traffic and I checked here to see that we've gone from a 30 domain authority to a 9. The company is a few months over 1 year old, but we're really looking at traffic accumulated in just about 8 months for the old domain. Is there any way to recover some of the old juice in this one other than the re-directs? Our number of backlinks have also severely dropped despite re-directs.
Technical SEO | | SteveSaf0 -
New domain's Sitemap.xml file loaded to old domain - how does this effect SEO?
I have a client who recently changed their domain when they redesigned their site. The client wanted the old site to remain live for existing customers with links to the new domain. I guess as a workaround, the developer loaded the new domain's sitemap.xml file to the old domain. What SEO ramifications would this have if any on the primary (new) domain?
Technical SEO | | julesae0 -
Why is an error page showing when searching our website using Google "site:" search function?
When I search our company website using the Google site search function "site:jwsuretybonds.com", a 400 Bad Request page is at the top of the listed pages. I had someone else at our company do the same site search and the 400 Bad Request did not appear. Is there a reason this is happening, and are there any ramifications to it?
Technical SEO | | TheDude0 -
Domains and subdomains
When I started a campaign for my message, I got the message: "We have detected that the domain www.vamospaella.com and the domain vamospaella.com both respond to web requests and do not redirect. Having two "twin" domains that both resolve forces them to battle for SERP positions, making your SEO efforts less effective. We suggest redirecting one, then entering the other here." I wasn't sure whether I had said it was a subdomain when in fact it was a domain (or the other way round), so I started another campaign for the same website using the other option and the message didn't come up. However, I still don't understand what you meant by this and whether it's an issue. When I search for my website in Google, it shows as vamospaella.com when other websites come up as www. and then their domain name. If it is a problem, is it to do with my hosting package and how it's set up or is it to do with my local site on my computer? I did ring my web host, 1&1, but they said they couldn't see a problem. Please can you let me know how I can resolve this as my ranking is still quite low in Google and I'm not sure why. If it is because of "twin domains", then will Google see my content as duplicated and keep me low in their rankings? I'm new to SEO and not a website novice, so please answer in lay terms! Thanks Melissa
Technical SEO | | melissa10 -
Keyword in Domain or not?
My on page optimization grade is an "A" with the following factors; Factor Overview <dl class="scoreboard clearfix"> <dt>Critical Factors</dt> <dd>4 / 4</dd> <dt>High Importance Factors</dt> <dd>7 / 7</dd> <dt>Moderate Importance Factors</dt> <dd>8 / 9</dd> <dt>Low Importance Factors</dt> <dd>11 / 11</dd> <dt>Optional Factors</dt> <dd>5 / 5</dd> </dl> The main thing I appear to be missing is keywords in my URL. How truly important is that in today's SEO world and how much time or ranking would be lost if I do not have control to change the external links to my website if I decided to migrate to a keyword relevant url?
Technical SEO | | classa0 -
Why am i receiving two different speed reports for my site
Hi i am a bit puzzled. i am optimizing my site to speed it up but i am getting two different speed reports. my site is www.in2town.co.uk and the two speed websites i am using are http://tools.pingdom.com and http://gtmetrix.com Can anyone please let me know what results they are getting for my site with the two above tools and also why i am getting two different results. the other day before i made some changes, i was getting on average 2 seconds for loading speed, but at the moment, sometimes i am getting seven seconds and then when i test it again it goes down to three seconds or below. Also, does anyone know how i can test to make sure that my site is faster when you go from one page to another on my site. I am not getting the true loading experience on my site from one page to another because good old virgin are updating their broadband in our area and we have also had voltage problem, whatever this means on our broadband box outside on our street which they claim they have sorted. any help would be great
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Use of Robots.txt file on a job site
We are performing SEO on a large niche Job Board. My question revolves around the thought of no following all the actual job postings from their clients as they only last for 30 to 60 days. Anybody have any idea on the best way to handle this?
Technical SEO | | WebTalent0 -
Multiple Domains, Same IP address, redirecting to preferred domain (301) -site is still indexed under wrong domains
Due to acquisitions over time and the merging of many microsites into one major site, we currently have 20+ TLD's pointing to the same IP address as our "preferred domain:" for our consolidated website http://goo.gl/gH33w. They are all set up as 301 redirects on apache - including both the www and non www versions. When we launched this consolidated website, (April 2010) we accidentally left the settings of our site open to accept any of our domains on the same IP. This was later fixed but unfortunately Google indexed our site under multiple of these URL's (ignoring the redirects) using the same content from our main website but swapping out the domain. We added some additional redirects on apache to redirect these individual pages pages indexed under the wrong domain to the same page under our main domain http://goo.gl/gH33w. This seemed to help resolve the issue and moved hundreds of pages off the index. However, in December of 2010 we made significant changes in our external dns for our ip addresses and now since December, we see pages indexed under these redirecting domains on the rise again. If you do a search query of : site:laboratoryid.com you will see a few hundred examples of pages indexed under the wrong domain. When you click on the link, it does redirect to the same page but under the preferred domain. So the redirect is working and has been confirmed as 301. But for some reason Google continues to crawl our site and index under this incorrect domains. Why is this? Is there a setting we are missing? These domain level and page level redirects should be decreasing the pages being indexed under the wrong domain but it appears it is doing the reverse. All of these old domains currently point to our production IP address where are preferred domain is also pointing. Could this be the issue? None of the pages indexed today are from the old version of these sites. They only seem to be the new content from the new site but not under the preferred domain. Any insight would be much appreciated because we have tried many things without success to get this resolved.
Technical SEO | | sboelter0