Canonical Question For Different Languages

[bigfootdigital]

My client has a site that supports different languages in the following structure:

www.domain.com - English version

www.domain.com/IT - Italian version

www.domain/DE - German version

etc....

I have set the languages up within Webmaster Tools but do I need to set up the canonical tag for all internal pages as they are basically the same but just in a different language i.e.

www.domain.com/index.php is the same as www.domain.com/DE/index.php but in a different language.

Thanks

[gfiorelli1]

Hi Mark,

I'm checking old Q&A and see yours is still marked as unanswered. Are you looking for more answers or aren't you satisfied with mine and Tom answers? If it is so, it would be great if we can help you further.

If not, it would be great if you could sign the question as answered

Ciao

Gianluca

[gfiorelli1]

When it comes to rel="canonical" and hreflang coexistence, I tend to prefer the self-referential rel="canonical" and not crossing one, also in the case of pages in the same languages.

That's because, in terms of International SEO, localizing a page means also localizing the language, and we know that - for instance - American English and British English have their differences.

Then there can be also other very small but meaningful differences (as phone numbers, currencies et al), so having the UK URL - for instance - canonicalized toward the US one is not correct.

And don't forget that if you canonicalize an URL to another one, but say to Google to show the first one in a given country, then Google will present that URL, but the search snippet will mirror the Title and Meta Description of the canonical URL, which sucks if you have decided to localize the search snippet.

Said that, in the case the content (all the content) of the two URLs is identical, then you can use the cross canonical.

[TomRayner]

Hi Mark

If the content is in a different language, you won't need to use a canonical that points to one language version of the site.  Basically, if the content is different on all of the pages - and by different, this can just mean language and words, rather than content - then you won't need to use a cross-reference canonical, such as having the canonical tag for your DE index page set to www.domain.com/index.php.  Provided that the content is "unique" in that sense, you'll be fine. You can still use self referring canonicals of course.

It's well worth reading through the Google Webmaster blog on canonicals and hreflang tags for multi-language sites as well, you can find that here.