Url for Turkish, Russian, Chinese, Arabic, Vietnamese and Arabic websites
-
Hello !
We gonna release our next website with new amazing languages.
However I was wondering, is it better to keep the url in English or I can translate them in :
- Turkish (should be fine)
- Chinese
- Arabic
- Vietnamese
- Arabic
- Russian
All websites are properly translated but I'm hesitating for the url.
Tks a lot !
-
6 Months later how well does it do ?
-
So what I did is:
Arabic, Turkish, Russian and Vietnamese URL are 100% translated. For chineses I followed my traductor advise and make in in Pinyin which is supposed to be the latin version of the chinese characters.
Let see how does google, Bing & Yandex like our website now !
-
Based on your previous answer I gonna translate them for a while and see how it's going on.
I think it's a good idea to translate all the URL as our main website is in English and all other are translations.
Never easy to go for those kind of projects.
Tks a lot !
-
The majority of websites I have seen that are for non-Latin language websites, such as Greek and the examples you give, have used URLs using the latin alphabet. Some of the URLs are spelt phonetically, others just use the English equivalent term.
I always like to look at news sites for these regions and see what URL format they use for these. If you look at http://www.newsru.com for Russia, http://alhayat.com/ for Saudi Arabia, you can see the format I mentioned being used.
Now, interestingly, the exception I keep seeing seems to be Wikipedia. Here is their Chinese (simplified) site: http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/ - click on a link there and you get Chinese characters in the URL.
But just look what happens when you try and copy-paste the raw URL: http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%89%A9%E7%90%86%E5%AD%A6 - you get this code instead of the characters. To me (albeit as a Westerner) this could cause problems when linking.
Ultimately, looking at just SEO, if you use latin or local characters it won't be the deciding factor for your performance. From a user experience point of view, you could make an argument for both cases. It certainly won't look out of place if you use latin characters in the URL as that is just the way of the web and indeed the majority of the websites in these regions use such a format. I'd have a look at websites in that region that are related to what you're looking at and see what structure they use. They might use English denominated URLs, or they might give latin-spelled, phonetic URLs (Greece is noticeable for doing this - they spell the word in latin characters as how it would be pronounced in Greek, something I like to call Greeklish). Make your decision based on the user experience, but when doing so take heed of the sites already out there and how they're approaching it and you won't go too far wrong.
Hope this helps.
-
That's also possible.
Check this post: http://uxmag.com/articles/a-url-in-any-language
In any language they will work fine due to Internationalized Resource Identifiers, when you copy paste them they might look weird because of that, but they will still work in a browser.
Edit: offering the URL also translated will be helpful for SEO too. Imagine a user searching for your site in their language, they will probably click on the one that it's written in their language that on the the one that has an English URL.
-
Hello
Tks for this answer. You're totally right for all latin languages, but what about the other ones ?
-
Definitely go for translating the URLs into their relevant languages. This was discussed in a previous thread which is worth looking at.
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
-
Using same URL for both "en" and "en-us" hreflang tags
Hi,I have a question. Is it okay if I use the same URL for both "en" and "en-us" hreflang tags? For example, for my en-us page: Is this okay with Google? What are your thoughts on this?
International SEO | | Avid_Demand0 -
Best way to interlink 25 different language versions of a website?
I have a website which has 25 different language versions on 16 different domains. Hreflan are setup to point to different language versions. In the footer we have deeplinks to the 25 language versions. Site is not spammy but in small niche and many language versions have very few other external links. For some time this site had lost rankings for reasons that are unclear till now. I see that large international sites such as booking.com, tripadvisor, apple all use different approaches to interlink their language versions. Interestingly Tripadvisor is nowadays loading the links to their other language versions dynamically only upon click so that these links do not show up in source code, deviating from their former implementation of static deeplinks to all language versions. Matt Cutts mentioned back in 2013 “If you have 50 different sites, I wouldn’t link to all 50 sites down in the footer of your website, because that can start to look pretty spammy to users. Instead you might just link to no more than three or four or five down in the footer, that sort of thing, or have a link to a global page, and the global page can talk about all the different verions and country versions of your website.” But in their webmaster guidelines google recommends: "Consider cross-linking each language version of a page. That way, a French user who lands on the German version of your page can get to the right language version with a single click." I assume for SEO anyway these links have no value, but for user experience it would certainly be better to provide somewhere deeplinks to other language versions. Also the fact that language versions are on different domains and have few external backlinks may increase a bit the risk in our case. I guess in doubt I would prefer to be safe and load deeplinks only upon click same as tripadvisor. Any thoughts/suggestions on best interlinking in our specific case?
International SEO | | lcourse0 -
SEO When Teaching English To Russians
My girlfriend is from Saint Petersburg, Russia and now lives in Toronto, Canada. She's been teaching English to Russians for 3 years in person and on Skype, and now wants to start a website to get more 1-on-1 clients and sell online courses, which I have a lot of experience in. If you don't feel like reading my notes below, I'll summarize my main questions here: Would you lean to creating the site more in English or Russian language or both equally... with a .com or .ru or both (2 sites)... hosted in the U.S. or Russia? I've been reading a number of excellent threads about strategies and tactics for online marketing in multiple language (including some here on Moz), but am still confused about how best to approach this. Here are some notes: -Some prospects will search for her services in English and some in Russian (probably more in Russian). -If I build her a site primarily in English, she can take advantage of my experience in English keyword research, SEO, competitor research, and so on. If I build her a site primarily in Russian, I can still do those things, but not as efficiently or effectively. -If I were thinking first and foremost of our users, which is obviously a good place to start, the site would be in both English and Russian, but I've read that if a site has both English and Russian text, and is a .com instead of a .ru, that can really hurt its chances of ranking in Russia's Yandex search engine, which is used more in Russia than Google. Along the same lines, although most SEO sites are saying that it doesn't matter where you host a website these days, an exception seems to be that Yandex does reward sites that are hosted locally. Are these assertions true? -At first I assumed that organic search competition is lower in the Russian language, but I don't really know. I've also read that Yandex really rewards older domains and that it can be hard to beat them, which means competition may be quite high. So my questions again are: Would you lean to creating the site more in English or Russian or both... with a .com or .ru or both (2 sites)... hosted in the U.S. or Russia? Thanks in advance!
International SEO | | smilinggardener
Phil1 -
Setting up a website targeted for the US
Hi, As an English company we have a co.uk domain with .com domain pointing to this. We are now looking to launch a separate (new) website targeting the American market and I have been asked to do the following: If an American or Canadian IP address visits the .com website it automatically goes to our newly created website i.e. website 2. If a non-American or non-Canadian IP address goes to .com it automatically goes to the original website i.e. website 1. If a user is on website 1 and clicks an American flag it takes the website user to website 2. If a user is on website 2 and clicks on the UK flag it takes the website user to website 1. Can anyone advise the best way to go about doing this as I feel that this could effect our search rankings. I am concerned how the search engines will penalize website 2 (original site) which has good rankings. Thanks in advance.
International SEO | | Cybertill0 -
Another website clone issue
My site has been cloned by this f........ http://designer.aimeeprom.com/ original site http://www.5starweddingdirectory.com Still has our logo etc... How can we prevent this from happening, What should I do next. I have pinged them via the interactive chat but they do not reply..
International SEO | | Taiger0 -
'Mini' versions of our website for overseas markets. Does it matter?
Hi Guys. I work for an e-commerce site called TOAD Diaries, we make bespoke diaries and journals. In essence we allow people to design their own diary online, then we make it and send it. We have already sold some products to poeple in many European countries, (Malta, France, Germany) but we want to have a better online presence for those overseas markets. So….. We're want to do an overseas ‘test case’, to see if we can sell more products in Europe. Out thinking is this: We’ll buy a subdomain for a specific country. Then we’ll then build a ‘mini’ version of our site in the appropriate language. This be a country specific landing page with links to our ‘design your own diary’ pages, basket and checkout. All in the language we’re targeting. Question: Will having such a small number of pages in the targeted countries language effect out ability to rank well? It will be maybe 10 – 15 pages in size. Or is it much more to do with on page optimization and quality backlinks? i.e) the site's size has no impact. What other factors should we consider when trying to rank well in other European countries? Many thanks in advance.
International SEO | | isaac6630 -
For a website in portuguese what would you use? pt.domain.com, br.domain.com or domain.com.br
Hello We are a company with a website in several languages, one of them is portuguese. Our market is 2 times bigger in Brazil than in Portugal, but obviously Brazil has more potential in the future. In domain.com we have our main site in English. What would you use? pt.domain.com, br.domain.com or domain.com.br? In the first case, it means just portuguese, in the second Brazil but it is not geolocalized, and in the third, you are almost ignoring Portugal users... Duplicating content, doesn't seem to make sense... The content is basically international, so it is just the language that matters. Any help will be very much appreciated.
International SEO | | forex-websites0 -
Is it a bad idea to use characters with accents or graves within URLs?
Is there an issue using within the URL for a page words with accents or graves, for example including "Estándares"? Thanks Stuart
International SEO | | mcvicar0