Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Technical SEO
    4. Best practice for URL - Language/country

    Moz Q&A is closed.

    After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

    Best practice for URL - Language/country

    Technical SEO
    4
    4
    4822
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • Kilgray
      Kilgray last edited by

      Hi,

      We are planning on having our website localized into more languages. We already have an English and German version. The German version is currently a sub-domain:

      www.example.com --> English version

      de.example.com --> German version

      Is this recommended? Or is it always better to have URLs with language prefixes such a:

      www.example.com/de

      www.example.com/es

      Which is a better practice in terms of SEO?

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
      • Daniel_Morgan
        Daniel_Morgan last edited by

        Hi Peter,

        Both really good answers to your questions above but maybe it would be good to give you some further pointing in the right direction. Perhaps you could answer the questions below and I can give you my personal opinion on which method would be best:

        • will you be putting an equal amount of marketing (content, PR, etc.) into the Spanish version for example compared with English?

        • are you able to offer  fully localised service eg, Spanish customer service, Spanish sales team etc.?

        • is your company well-known globally?

        It's important not to also forget that another option is using ccTLDs (eg, .co.uk, .com.au). These give the highest signal to search engines about the country being targeted and also importantly make you look more "local" which can do wonders for increasing conversion rate in countries where your company is not well-known.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
        • BlueprintMarketing
          BlueprintMarketing last edited by

          I think that Tom gave you one of the best answers possible.

          However I hope this helps your site structure should be very similar to one contained in the two URL's

          If I may add a little bit of information that I thought was helpful

          • https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en
          • https://www.deepcrawl.com/knowledge/best-practice/hreflang-101-how-to-avoid-international-duplication/

          WHERE TO ADD YOUR HREFLANG TAGS

          You can add hreflang tags to your sitemaps, in the HTTP response headers, or on the page itself.

          IN YOUR SITEMAPS

          The best place to add hreflang is in your sitemap as including them in the headers or on the page adds weight to every single page request.

          The following example will inform Google about the English version from the German version of the website:

          <url>   <loc>http://www.example.com/deutsch/</loc></url>

          <xhtml:link< span="">                  rel=”alternate”                 hreflang=”en”                 href=”http://www.example.com/english/”                 />         <xhtml:link < span="">rel=”alternate”                 hreflang=”de”                 href=”http://www.example.com/deutsch/”                 /></xhtml:link <></xhtml:link<>

          This method would need to be repeated in full for every page on the site and for all the international websites.

          IN YOUR HEADERS AND HTML

          Hreflang tags can also be added to the HTTP header:

          Link: http://www.example.com/english/; rel=”alternate”; hreflang=”en” Link: http://www.example.com/deutsch/; rel=”alternate”; hreflang=”de”

          Or in the tag in the HTML:

          http://www.example.com/english/” /> http://www.example.com/deutsch/

          & because you will be creating a new site

          https://www.candidsky.com/blog/the-seo-2015-guide-to-website-migration/

          it would come down to your backlink profile if it were me I would use

          Moz open site Explorer,  Majestic, Ahrefs  and Google Webmaster tools to determine whether or not I will be receiving a enough Backlinks for a subdomain or separate TLD otherwise I would use a subfolder and an extremely fast method of hosting the site  Fastly is excellent or many other great methods as well.

          Hope this helps,

          Tom

          PS use

          http://hreflang.ninja/  to check

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
          • TomRayner
            TomRayner last edited by

            Hi Peter

            Both are viable options.

            I'd highly recommend going through Aleyda Solis' international SEO posts here on the Moz blog.  They can teach how to prepare for international SEO, how to approach site structure and how to generate relevant code and hreflang tags.

            Here is her international SEO checklist

            Here is her Hreflang blog post and generator tool

            And 40 tools to help advance your international SEO

            They're great reading and nothing that I'd be able to do add to, so I hope this helps!

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 3
            • 1 / 1
            • First post
              Last post

            Got a burning SEO question?

            Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


            Start my free trial


            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.

            • See all categories

            Related Questions

            • ghesta

              In writing the url, it is better to use the language used by the people of my country or English?

              We speak Persian and all people search in Persian on Google. But I read in some sources that the url should be in English. Please tell me which language to use for url writing?
              For example, I brought down two models: 1fb0e134-10dc-4737-904f-bfdf07143a98-image.png https://ghesta.ir/blog/how-to-become-rich/
              2)https://ghesta.ir/blog/چگونه-پولدار-شویم/

              Technical SEO | | ghesta
              0
            • RaquelSaiz

              Same URL for languages sub-directories

              Hi All, I have a main domain and 9 different subdirectories for languages,  example: www.example.com/page.html www.example.com/uk/page-uk.html www.example.com/es/page-es.html we are implementing hreflang tags for the languages, but we are thinking to get rid of the dashes on the languages URL: -uk or -es, so it will be: www.example.com/page.html www.example.com/uk/page.html www.example.com/es/page.hrml would this be a problem? to have same page names even if they are in different subdirectories? would we need to add canonical tags, at lease for the main domain URLs? www.kornferry.com/page.html Thank you, Rachel

              Technical SEO | | RaquelSaiz
              0
            • RoxBrock

              Do I use /es/, /mx/ or /es-mx/ for my Spanish site for Mexico only

              I currently have the Spanish version of my site under myurl.com/es/ When I was at Pubcon in Vegas last year a panel reviewed my site and said the Spanish version should be in /mx/ rather than /es/ since es is for Spain only and my site is for Mexico only. Today while trying to find information on the web I found /es-mx/ as a possibility. I am changing my site and was planning to change to /mx/ but want confirmation on the correct way to do this. Does anyone have a link to Google documentation that will tell me for sure what to use here? The documentation I read led me to the /es/ but I cannot find that now.

              Technical SEO | | RoxBrock
              0
            • Dan-Lawrence

              Image Height/Width attributes, how important are they and should a best practice site include this as std

              Hi How important are the image height/width attributes and would you expect a best practice site to have them included ? I hear not having them can slow down a page load time is that correct ? Any other issues from not having them ? I know some re social sharing (i know bufferapp prefers images with h/w attributes to draw into their selection of image options when you post) Most importantly though would you expect them to be intrinsic to sites that have been designed according to best practice guidelines ? Thanks

              Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence
              0
            • Santaur

              Best practices for controlling link juice with site structure

              I'm trying to do my best to control the link juice from my home page to the most important category landing pages on my client's e-commerce site. I have a couple questions regarding how to NOT pass link juice to insignificant pages and how best to pass juice to my most important pages. INSIGNIFICANT PAGES: How do you tag links to not pass juice to unimportant pages. For example, my client has a "Contact" page off of there home page. Now we aren't trying to drive traffic to the contact page, so I'm worried about the link juice from the home page being passed to it. Would you tag the Contact link with a "no follow" tag, so it doesn't pass the juice, but then include it in a sitemap so it gets indexed? Are there best practices for this sort of stuff?

              Technical SEO | | Santaur
              0
            • gallreddy

              What is the best URL designed for a product page?

              Should a product page URL include the category name and subcategory name in it? Most ecommerce platforms it seems are designed to do have the category and sub-category names included in the URL followed by the product name. If that is the case and the same product is listed in more then 1 category and sub-category then will that product have 2 unique urls and as a result be treated as 2 different product pages by google?   And then since it is the same product in two places on the site won't google treat those 2 pages as having duplicate content? SO is it best to not have the category and sub-category names in the URL of a product page? And lastly, is there a preferred character limit for a URL to be less than in size? Thanks!

              Technical SEO | | gallreddy
              0
            • upick-162391

              Trailing Slashes In Url use Canonical Url or 301 Redirect?

              I was thinking of using 301 redirects for trailing slahes to no trailing slashes for my urls. EG: www.url.com/page1/ 301 redirect to www.url.com/page1 Already got a redirect for non-www to www already. Just wondering in my case would it be best to continue using htacces for the trailing slash redirect or just go with Canonical URLs?

              Technical SEO | | upick-162391
              0
            • Hakkasan

              Google Off/On Tags

              I came across this article about telling google not to crawl a portion of a webpage, but I never hear anyone in the SEO community talk about them. http://perishablepress.com/press/2009/08/23/tell-google-to-not-index-certain-parts-of-your-page/ Does anyone use these and find them to be effective? If not, how do you suggest noindexing/canonicalizing a portion of a page to avoid duplicate content that shows up on multiple pages?

              Technical SEO | | Hakkasan
              1

            Get started with Moz Pro!

            Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

            Start my free trial
            Products
            • Moz Pro
            • Moz Local
            • Moz API
            • Moz Data
            • STAT
            • Product Updates
            Moz Solutions
            • SMB Solutions
            • Agency Solutions
            • Enterprise Solutions
            Free SEO Tools
            • Domain Authority Checker
            • Link Explorer
            • Keyword Explorer
            • Competitive Research
            • Brand Authority Checker
            • Local Citation Checker
            • MozBar Extension
            • MozCast
            Resources
            • Blog
            • SEO Learning Center
            • Help Hub
            • Beginner's Guide to SEO
            • How-to Guides
            • Moz Academy
            • API Docs
            About Moz
            • About
            • Team
            • Careers
            • Contact
            Why Moz
            • Case Studies
            • Testimonials
            Get Involved
            • Become an Affiliate
            • MozCon
            • Webinars
            • Practical Marketer Series
            • MozPod
            Connect with us

            Contact the Help team

            Join our newsletter
            Moz logo
            © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
            • Accessibility
            • Terms of Use
            • Privacy

            Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.