Change Lang. IP base, Browser Base or Manually?
-
Hello
I would like to ask a question about multi lang/international Website. Which one is better for SEO?
User in Different Countries automatically see The website in their Language?
or
User see the English version and can change the language manually?
-
Hi Guys,Gianluca brings up some good points.Talking about very real situations that happen to me quite often. I will prefer to read German and if there is a conversion like a purchase obviously I will have to back out and find the product that I hope is in stock for the US market.I think placing something the language that is native to the country and you can only hope the visitor.
"We saw you are visiting us from the USA. If you want you can go to www.domain.com. If not, do not consider this advice" (this is what Amazon does, for instance). Gianluca
- User see the English version and can change the language manually?
I would say user see native version for whatever country you're actually assuming that they are visiting from. Well said GianlucaAll the best,Thomas
-
You are not telling us if the different language versions are in the same website or in different ones.
In fact, if they are in different domains, the ideal - IMHO - is to not redirect people to the one corresponding to the their IP if they expressly entered in another language version (i.e.: the user is in the USA, like Thomas, but goes to www.domain.de because he is German). In those case is better presenting an advice to those user saying: "We saw you are visiting us from the USA. If you want you can go to www.domain.com. If not, do not consider this advice" (this is what Amazon does, for instance).
If the different language/country versions are on the same domain, then the ideal would be making those users landing on the correct language/country page because they clicked on their corresponding URLs from search thanks to hreflang. But, at the same time, letting them free to navigate throughout all versions (if there are not legal reasons for forbidding that, i.e. products that can be sold in one country but on in others for whatever reason).
Then, again in the case of multicountry in the same domain name, if users goes to the home page because of direct, a link or type-in, then you can use the same tactic I described before in case of different domains.
-
Well think that if you are in the end user / visitor's shoes.
I'm German and although I spend most of my life in United States, I would prefer German I have a better understanding of it. So if you prefer English over any other language or would you like to have to choose?
That's the way I will look at it in. You said something about IP address and they do matter ONLY if you do for have not correctly set up your site in GWT with hreflang.
So the good thing to check out would be WP engine Mercury project GeoIP that might have some interesting things for you to learn more about the subject. It is trying to provide the best end-user experience.
http://wpengine.com/support/geoip-personalizing-content-based-geography/
-
Good question,
I personally lean towards browser language selection and allow the option for manual change. Most major sites do it this way.
I changed my FF browser to DE (German) and noticed many sites will serve my content in German. If it were IP based I wouldn't have noticed many changes. Also with the amount of people who speak multiple languages, deployed overseas, or using proxies, IP based really isn't the best solution.
My vote browser based with manual option hope it helps,
Don
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
-
I changed settings in search console and my rankings dropped significantly?
hi reader, 3 weeks ago i changed international targeting setting in search console to USA and 3 weeks. ago i was ranking pretty fine in the US. now i am out of top 100. is it search console or other reason?
International SEO | | maria-cooper90 -
International SEO - how likely is it autoredirect via IP Address will impact rankings?
Hello, We're looking to internationalise our site so that US visitors will see the US branded version while everyone else will see the global version (currently at .com). This question specifically is about location-based auto-redirects. The literature I've read (including Google) recommends against auto-redirection: "Avoid automatic redirection based on the user’s perceived language. These redirections could prevent users (and search engines) from viewing all the versions of your site." Insofar as I understand it the theory goes as follows. Google crawls mainly from the US Auto-redirecting by US IP to the US domain will also redirect the Googlebot crawlers Because of this the crawlers will only see the US site / domain and not original .com website Crawlers can't index what they can't see Drop in rankings for the original site However, one of my colleagues has pointed out to me a company which does use auto-redirects. If a user is in the UK and type in their website they will be redirected to the UK version of the site, US will be US etc. I have checked their rankings and they are still ranking highly for relevant terms. I have been asked why they have been able to do this without impacting their visibility. Any ideas? Given their success have the risks of auto-redirecting have been overstated? How can we ensure US visitors land on the correct internationalised domain without auto-redirects in place? Looking forward to your thoughts on this as well as your experiences. Thanks in advance!
International SEO | | SEOCT0 -
XML Href Lang Setup
Hi, currently I have created an XML Href Lang site map for the main .com website. Lets call it projectx.com in this XML href lang file I have indicated that there is also a projectx.co.uk version of the site. Question: Would the XML HREF LANG sitemap file be uploaded to the root of the main projectx.com only? or would another version need to be uploaded to the projectx.co.uk root too? Thanks in advance!
International SEO | | Iannaude0 -
Can a Global Website Rely on Browser Settings for Translation?
Our website serves a global market and over a year ago, we launched 8 language variations of the site and implemented hreflang tags. These language variation pages are proving difficult to maintain, and in Search Console they're triggering thousands of errors. I have double checked our implementation and it's not perfect, so I understand the errors. Here's the question though... the 8 language variations of the site are receiving less than 1% of our web traffic despite 40% of our web traffic coming from countries outside of North America every month. I want to know if we can eliminate the headache of these 8 language variations altogether, remove our attempt at hreflang, and simply rely on the browser settings of the user to dictate what language the website appears in for them? If not, is there a simpler solution than hreflang and attempting to maintain a very large website in 8 languages? Thank for your input! Niki
International SEO | | NikelleClark0 -
Impact changing domain from ccTLD to .com
I've got a couple of clients who have an international market for their products or services. Both of these clients have a .co.uk domain. For one site the US market is the major audience, the other it's european countries. At the moment, neither of these clients have translated page or content targeted to a specific country. There are no plans at this stage to create such content. Google considers the .co.uk to be targeted to the United Kingdom. The assumption is that by changing this to .com it will increase their international reach. For both the domains, referral and direct traffic is much more diverse than organic (which as you'd expect is heavily UK weighted - but there is some international organic traffic) Does anyone have any experience making such a change? How did the change affect your international reach/visibility? Does anyone have any metrics that they'd like to share that could be used to make a case to clients? (Note, I'm not interested in how you'd go about handling the domain change - I'm happy/confident about doing this.)
International SEO | | DougRoberts0 -
Does changing host server between countries affect SEO if there is no content change?
My website is currently hosted with Go-daddy and the hosting server is in the USA on a Linux platform. The problem is, the response time for my Australian Customers, is too slow, as a result, I decided to move to another Go Daddy Hosting server in the Asia Pacific Region. This has been completed successfully, however I think there may be some impact on my rankings. Can you advise if there are any specific things that I must do, when I move to a different hosting server with the same company or an alternative company. Note: We are not changing domain names or content, purely just moving to a hosting server closer to where our customers are based. Looking forward to your response.
International SEO | | fdep0 -
SEO international - ccTLD or Subdirectories / Hosting on 1 server (IP) in Netherlands
Hi All, I do mingle me in discussion if it's better to have an Ecommerce site of a Brand X on seperate ccTLD's (Brand.nl / Brand.de / Brand.com or use subdirectories (brand.com/nl, brand.com/de, brand.com/fr etc. I see a lot of comments on this, but i am missing one (maybe) essential part. We are using Magento with multi ccTLD support. BUT the environment is hosted in the Netherlands. Will we be "penalized" on hosting in NL when using www.brand.DE or other countries? Or is it MUCH better to host those ccTLD in country of Origin? Because if it is, maybe we can better use subdirs because then we can use our builded authority of the root domain. Hope someone have an answer on this one! Thanks! Jeroen
International SEO | | RetailClicks0 -
Will changing my host affect my rankings
Were moving our site from a UK server to an Australian server to benefit from hosting our site in our home country. The domain name is the same, the template and files are all the same so will we lose rankings at all when the website is moved? I plan on leaving the old website up there until the new website is cached. What considerations should we think of before we migrate? Cheers
International SEO | | acs1110