What is the best CMS Approach for Multilingual Versions of Site?
-
We have expanded into France and Brazil and now have a someone in-house that can translate to French and Brazilian Portuguese. I own ".fr" and ".com.br" versions of our domain. We are using Wordpress for our CMS. We are currently publishing about 2 articles a week on English site which we would be translating and publishing through new international sites (when appropriate). We will be changing out photos and videos at times in addition to all the text/copy.
So, before I jump deep into this I wanted to reach out for help regarding the best modern approach to this. Should I use some sort of WP Plugin that will let me manage each of these through 1 WP install or is it better to run each separately through multiple WP installs?
I want to achieve this while...
- avoiding any duplicate content penalties.
- provide easy admin/editor management of publishing content.
Any help/advice is greatly appreciated. Thanks!
-
Seems like the safe solution would be to go with separate sites and localize hosting for each as you mentioned.
I just discovered Multilingual Press WP plugin (https://wordpress.org/plugins/multilingual-press/). Looks like it can provide ccTld and ability to manage all through a single WP Site with Pro version. I would lose the potential SEO benefit from local hosting, but efficient management might beat that. Need to dig into this a bit more.
Also, WordPress Multilingual plugin (http://wpml.org) was recommended to me for "folders" or "sub-domain" solutions. I need to dig into this more, but I do feel better about using ccTld for each.
Thanks for all the help and resources!
-
Wow that is an interesting work around! Thanks for sharing!
-
In my experience, the best way to do this would be to set up the .fr domain separately as it's own separate WordPress installation, and have it hosted at a hosting company with a presence in France.
However, what's best for SEO sometimes creates more work for administering a site, vs. having it all available from one login in one WordPress instance.
As far as using a .fr domain, there are many schools of thought on this.
This Moz blog goes into the top strategies:
http://moz.com/blog/international-seo-dropping-the-information-dustAmazon uses ccTld (Country Code, Top Level Domains). For example, Amazon.com, Amazon.de, Amazon.fr, etc.
Apple uses a subdomain / sub-carpet strategy: (i.e. store.apple.com/es)
In my past experience building out eCommerce and other stores, if you host locally, and use different ccTld (i.e. domain.fr), you won't have to worry about the duplicate content issue, as Google and other search engines will see this as it's own site, especially if it's translated (well) into another language.
Here's more on International SEO best practices:
http://moz.com/learn/seo/international-seoI hope this helps!
-- Jeff -
I recently had to solve the same issue. I don't know if my approach is the best one, but I will describe it.
- I use tags to set the post language, "lang=EN" is the tag for english post, "lang=IT" is the tag for the italian post, etc...
- I wrote a 20 lines WP plugin to add a custom panel in the post edit page, the custom panel show a list of input fields, one input field for each enabled language (in my case were EN+IT+DE), for the language of the post the input field is prefilled with the slug of the post and read only, for the other languages the input field is manually filled with the slug of the corresponding post in the other language. I didn't make those fields mandatory, but you can choose to do so with 1 line of code.
- The language switcher just redirect to it.domain.com or de.domain.com or domain.com.
- You can edit (again just few lines of code) the WP template you use to filter the blog roll according to the selected language, showing all post tagged with that language plus all post without any language tag (that's an arbitrary decision, in your case maybe you want to filter those out, yes not filtering them out you incur in content duplication).
At the end was just few lines of code, and I could even do it myself (I am far from a PHP coder).
In my case I didn't edit the WP template because I am using a different rendering engine, but that doesn't mean much.
I would not use different WP installation, it makes editing cumbersome.
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
-
What Is The Best Strategy For Writing Image Alt Text For SEO?
Curious on this topic, as websites that are image heavy, but have little written content can have depend on alt text for "readable content". I am aware the "best practice" is to write it as if you were describing the image to a blind person, but are there any SEO strategies that people have seen good results with? Some examples I've heard are: "unique keyword phrase" "unique keyword phrase + brand name" "Unique Keyword Phrase + LSI Keyword" Interested to hear feedback from the Moz Community! And thanks in advance for sharing your insight.
Local Website Optimization | | LureCreative0 -
Best SEO practice for project galley (image gallery) ? I need SEO Professionals advice.
Hi, i Have a website that is powerful and i dont want to hurt it. http://dreamgaragedoor.com/ right now i need a projects gallery page that people goes there to find out the models and products and services images. i have created the page and it would be 6 slider in the page and each slider has at least 10 images inside. first question is having this much images would or wouldnt hurt my webiste. second what ALT should i use for this many pictures in 1 page. for example i think having ALT like below in one page would be bad SEO wise. Sliding-gate-1, Sliding-gate-2, Sliding-gate-3, Sliding-gate-4,... please take a look at the gallery page and let me have your pro ideas. http://dreamgaragedoor.com/galleries/ thanks
Local Website Optimization | | Mishel2980 -
Does it matter how or what site you use to GeoTag your photos?
I found a site that was very easy for me to upload my pictures, add the coordinates, download it and put it on my site. The site is GeoImgr.com, but it's not nearly as popular as some of the other's out there. Does that matter? I'm under the impression that as long as the GPS coordinates show up in the XIF Viewer, then I've gotten whatever benefit (albeit slight) there is to get. Is that correct? Or is there something about tagging them from the more popular sites like Flickr or Panaramio? Thanks, Ruben
Local Website Optimization | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
Recommended blogs and sites about local seo
HI.
Local Website Optimization | | corn2015
Can you please tell me some great blogs/sites to read daily about local seo? I'm really wanting to beef up my knowledge in this area to assist local businesses. Corn1 -
Onsite Optimization for 2 Locations on One Site
Hello, We have multiple client who have 2 office locations n the same state in varying counties and would like to have their site rank for two counties. Is this plausible ? For instance they would like their header tags to read "Lawyer in Middlesex & Monmouth County NJ" Rather than "Middlesex County NJ Lawyer" Would this be an effective strategy or be seen as stuffing by Google?
Local Website Optimization | | Armen-SEO0 -
Best way to remove spammy landing pages?
Hey Mozzers, We recently took over a website for a new client of ours and discovered that their previous webmaster had been using a WordPress plugin to generate 5,000+ mostly duplicated local landing pages. The pages are set up more or less as "Best (service) provided in (city)" I checked Google Webmaster Tools and it looks like Google is ignoring most of these spammy pages already (about 30 pages out of nearly 6,000 are indexed), but it's not reporting any manual webspam actions. Should we just delete the landing pages all at once or phase them out a few (hundred) at a time? Even though the landing pages are mostly garbage, I worry that lopping off over 95% of a site's pages in one fell swoop could have other significant consequences. Thanks!
Local Website Optimization | | BrianAlpert780 -
International site, be visible on both .com and .co.uk?
Do you guys have any tips to increase the visibility in both Google.com and Google.co.uk? The site today, have good visibility in USA, but its poor in the UK... Information: The server is based in US. No region is set in the Google Webmaster Tools. Incoming links are from global regions, mostly US. Do we need to add a specific section for the UK (uk.site.com or site.com/uk/) and specify region in GWT to make sure Google handle this the right way? Its a lot of work, rewrite all the content for another section, which also is in english...
Local Website Optimization | | Vivamedia0 -
What's the best way to add phrase keywords to the URL?
Hi, Our keywords are all our service + a list of towns (for example, "carpet cleaning St. Louis"). The issue I'm having is that one particular site could be targeting "carpet cleaning St. Louis", "carpet cleaning Manchester", "carpet cleaning Ballwin", "carpet cleaning Kirkwood", etc. etc. etc... up to maybe 15 different towns. Is there a way to effectively add these keywords into the URL without making it look spammy? I'm having the same issue with adding the exact keywords to the page title, img alt tag, etc. Thanks for any advice/input!
Local Website Optimization | | nataliefwc0