SEO in foreign languages
-
Hi everyone,
I currently run a website called Barquitos www.barquitos.com
The site is an extension of a shop that is based here in Spain. Though because the town is particularly touristy we built the website to offer English and Spanish as language options on the site. English on Barquitos.com and Spanish through a sub domain es.barquitos.com.
In an ideal world I want to rank the English version for English phrases on Google.co.uk, and the Spanish sub domain on es.barquitos.com. However, my Spanish is only at a reasonable standard, probably not good enough to look at writing quality content in Spanish.
Is building up the Page Authority and Domain authority for the English main domain enough to rank the Spanish sub domain or do we need a focussed approach for both languages?
Any tips or advice for helping to rank sub domains in foreign languages would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks everyone
Stu
-
Hi Stu, as the root domain and sub-domain are targeting different geo-locations, moreoever Google treats the sub-domains a little more like a stand alone website, it is highly recommended to earn links for both of them individually, by all possible means from their respective geographies, I mean from the web properties operating or targeting audience in those geo-locations. For example, it would be odd for me to earn links for a Japanese website, targeting Japanese audience from web properties operating or targeting USA audience. Though this is not uncommon, it will not serve the purpose. Over and above this, fetching quality back links from any where is always recommended especially if those links are from authority web properties with high DA, PA and other SEO goodies like good Google PageRank etc..
I would conclude by addressing your question that fetching links to the root domain will not help much to make the sub-domain rank high in search results for many obvious reasons. Just like we do deep link promotions for promoting pages other than the home page so that they can rank high for their respective target terms, we should be promoting the sub-domains also as if they were standalone websites so as to get maximum benefit from an off-page promotional campaign.
Hope it helps my friend.
Best,
Devanur Rafi
-
Thanks Devanur, appreciate the response.
Yeah I have read that before, and took everything into account when setting up the site. My only issue now is really pushing the SEO ongoing. Would you say pushing the link building on the main domain (English site and English SEO) would in turn rank the sub domain as well?
Many thanks
Stu
-
Hi Stu, here is a quick link from Google that can guide you in this regard:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en
Once you go through it, please feel free to get back with further queries.
Best,
Devanur Rafi
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
-
International SEO - UK & US
Hi! I'm currently working with a brand that is well established in the UK and is looking to expand it's reach in US. The UK site has a solid link profile and I think that creating a sub-folder for the US site is by far the best solution. My only concern is that the UK site uses a .co.uk domain. Would it therefore be counter-productive to use a subfolder that looks like this: www.example.co.uk/us In an ideal world I would advise the brand to acquire a location neutral domain (e.g. www.example.com) however the [brandname].com isn't available and options are otherwise very limited! Steps would be taken to ensure all other technical bases are covered (hreflang tags etc) but I'm struggling to find any further insight on this issue. Any feedback from the community would be greatly appreciated! Many thanks, Harrison
International SEO | | harrycox0 -
An International SEO Conundrum
Hello all, I'm looking for opinions on this. Imagine there is a website example.com in English and the company 'Example' wanted to translate some of the pages (not not all) in to Russian. So they set up example.com/ru and translate the key pages into Russian. But half of the pages on.com/ru are left in English and there are no plans to translate them. How would you handle the pages in Engish on .com/ru? My thoughts are that they should: Canonicalise to the same versions on .com, and... Remove RU hreflang tags from the pages on .com/ru which are in English Otherwise, users searching in English with Russian browser settings could land on a page in English but then navigate to a translated page in Russian (+the menu navigation items will be in Russian) = bad UX. Not to mention they would be telling Google a page is in Russain but Google would be crawling English. So IMO, the best option is to use canonicals for this so that the .com version of the page is indexed. Then when a user lands after searching in English they will always be served English pages within that session. If English speakers/searchers land on the .com/ru page that would lead to a website half in one lang and half in another. I'm aware that Google recommends not using rel="canonical" across country or language versions of your site, but I believe they are making that recommendation based on an assumption that all pages are going to be translated to another language. In this case, there is no intention to do that, ever. Thanks for your thoughts and opinions. Cheers, Gill.
International SEO | | Cannetastic0 -
Country and Language Specific URL Paths
Wanted to ask everyone a questions: So our company is going to be doing a website that is going to be full of videos. The url path will be country.domain.com/language/slug/content-id. We redirect the user when they go to the different country. So if you're in spain on a train to france your URL will change from es.domain.com/es/slug/content-id to fr.domain.com/es/slug/content-id. Each country can listen to each video in all languages. My question is with hreflang tags and canonicals. Aside from targeting users in a certain country via Google Search Console, how do I eliminate duplication and tell Google which I'd like to show up via which country. In spain I would like es.domain.com/es/slug/content-id to show in Google and would have hreflang tags on each of the es.domain pages but what about fr.domain.com/es/slug/content-id since it would show the same content? I can't canonical to one of them since I need them to show in their respective country. How do I show the difference in language and country without showing duplication?
International SEO | | mattdinbrooklyn0 -
Has any one seen negative SEO effects from using Google Translate API
We have a site currently in development that is using the Google Translate API and I am having a massive issue getting screaming frog to crawl and all of our non-native English speaking employees have read through the translated copy in their native language and the general consensus is it reads at a 5th grade level at best. My questions to the community is, has anyone implemented this API on a site and has it a) helped with gaining traffic from other languages/countires and b) has it hurt there site from an SEO standpoint.
International SEO | | VERBInteractive0 -
Is it OK to change language by user IP?
Hello, I just read https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en#1 about multilingual website. Google says "Avoid automatic redirection based on the user’s perceived language". so Is it ok to redirect url by user IP instead of user language?
International SEO | | visaasancard0 -
Best domain for spanish language site targeting ALL spanish territories?
hi, we're have a strong .com domain and are looking to launch a site for spanish speakers (ie latin america + spain). we already have various subdirectories for some foreign language sites (eg. ourdomain.co.uk, us.ourdomain.com, ca.ourdomain.com, ourdomainchina.com, ourdomainindia.com etc) we already have a B2B site ourdomain.com-es which will remain the same. I'm thinking best practice would be to launch translated copy for the following: ourdomain.com/es ourdomain.com/cl ourdomain.com/mx ourdomain.com/pt etc etc firstly is this the best option? secondly, i'm really interested to hear whether there is a less time/resource intensive route that would give us visibility in ALL spanish speaking territories? Also - if we go with just one of the above (eg ourdomain.com/cl) how likely are we to get traction in other spanish speaking territories? any help much appreciated!
International SEO | | KevinDunne0 -
SEO difficulty between languages?
Hello, I would like to know if there are certain factors that determine SEO difficulty between different languages or countries. Is doing SEO more difficult in Japan than in the United States? What would be some factors that could help determine the above? Thanks in advance,
International SEO | | SS-ose0 -
Do non-english(localized) URLs help Local SEO and user experience?
Hi Everyone, This question is about URL best practice for multilingual websites. We have www.example.com in English and we are building the exact replica of English site in German www.example.de. On the Geman site, we are considering to translate some portions of the URLs for example last folder and file name as seen below: example.de/folder1-in-english/folder2-in-english/folder3-in-german/filename-in-german.html Is this a good idea? Will this help SEO and user experience both? or the mixed languagues in URL will confuse the users? Google guidelines say that this should be ok. Would love to get feedback from SEOMOZ community! Thanks, Supriya.
International SEO | | Amjath0