URL structure of international hotel website

[mlehr]

Hai all,

Question about URL structure of international hotel website in Amsterdam: hotelcitadel.nl.

Some information:

-          Target group are mainly english speaking guests from UK and US. Besides that guests from the Netherlands and some other countries.

-          Website in 6 languages.

-          No geo-targetting; just language targetting with hreflang annotations.

Current situation:

hotelcitadel.nl = dutch language version and hotelcitadel.nl/en = english language version

We are thinking about changing this to:

hotelcitadel.nl would become english version and hotelcitadel.nl/nl would become the dutch version.

Reason: root domain hotelcitadel.nl has by far the most links,and making the root domain the english version could help the rankings in english speaking countries like UK and US.

What do you think, would this be a wise idea?

Regards, Maurice

[mlehr]

Great Stephan, nice to hear and thanks again

Regards, Maurice

[StephanSolomonidis]

Hi Maurice,

Yes, that's right: the Hotel Nicolaas site is behaving correctly. When I visit the homepage there, everything is consistent and in English, and the language cookie is set to en-GB. Even when I manually change that cookie value to nl-NL, the content is still in English, because I'm on an English-language URL. To get Dutch content I have to visit the /nl/ directory. That's a much better setup, because there's no way to end up with duplicate English-language content: the URLs are consistent.

Best Regards,

Stephan

[mlehr]

Hai Stephan,

Thanx again, very helpfull!

I still have 1 question concerning point 2.

Some months ago we rebuilt the website of a “sisterhotel”: www.hotelnicolaas.nl . As far as I can check the website of this hotel does not have the problems/strange behavior anymore as you discribe concerning www.hotelcitadel.nl  Is that correct? Is the website of www.hotelnicolaas.nl behaving correctly concerning the languages?

(You will notice that we already changed the URL-structure there and that the homepage is the English version. We still have to add x-default.)

Regards, Maurice

[StephanSolomonidis]

Hi Maurice,

Sorry for the delay in getting back to you. To address points 2 and 3 that you've raised there:

2. I'm still seeing this behaviour on the site, and it persists across different browsers. I've attached some images to show what I'm seeing. However, if I then click on the English flag (to visit /en/), and then click the Netherlands flag, a cookie is set: jfcookie[lang]="nl". After this cookie is set, the homepage appears in Dutch for me. So it seems as though visitors to the homepage of your website are served English-language content based on the absense of a jfcookie[lang] cookie, or based on their IP address -- you would have to check with your developers which is the case -- and it's only after visiting one of the other languages and then switching back to Dutch that the homepage will appear in Dutch.

3. I don't believe you would see a rankings boost from doing this. I think that, provided x-default is correctly set (to English, in your case), and this issue with the language cookies/IP address is corrected, you can expect Google to figure out the correct page to show in the results for each country/language combination. I do hear what you're saying about most of your customers speaking English, but I also think that, given you use a ccTLD, it could create a strange user experience to have English content on the homepage and Dutch in a subfolder. And x-default largely solves the problem of most of your users speaking English. I don't think there's enough upside to justify the effort.

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[mlehr]

Hai Stephan,

Thanks for your suggestions.

1. Add the x-default is a good idea. I’ll do that.
2. Difference HTML lang and hreflang: I do not see this problem. Homepage hotelcitadel.nl: HTML=nl and content is written in dutch and not in english…Am I seeing something else then you do?
3. Just to be sure that I understand you correct: What do you think about my proposed change of URL’s, wise? Will it make our website stronger for rankings in the english speaking market? Or better to leave it as it is?

Cheers, Maurice

[StephanSolomonidis]

Hi Maurice,

Both of these pages are on the same root domain, because you've (sensibly) used subfolders for languages, instead of subdomains. The arrangement you're thinking of switching to does sound as though it better describes target market: it'd be nice to see x-default set to english, if that's the language spoken by the majority of your visitors/target market.

When I visit the homepage as Googlebot, the hreflang is "nl", but the html lang is "en". Also, the page content appears to be in English. When I then navigate to hotelcitadel.nl/en, I get exactly the same English-language content, with html lang equal to "en" again, and hreflang "en".

The other languages work OK, and are crawlable, but you should correct the duplicate content issue between the homepage and the /en/ subfolder, and also the discrepancy between "html lang" and "hreflang" on the homepage. It should either be definitively in English, for all users, or definitively in Dutch. Perhaps you're using an IP redirect to determine language on the homepage? If so, I'd suggest not doing that. Your other languages seem to be set up OK.