Correct site internationalization strategy
-
Hi,
I'm working on the internationalization of a large website; the company wants to reach around 100 countries. I read this Google doc: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en in order to design the strategy.
The strategy is the following:
For each market, I'll define a domain or subdomain with the next settings:
- Leave the mysitename.com for the biggest market in which it has been working for years, and define the geographic target in Google search console.
- Reserve the ccTLD domains for other markets
- In the markets where I'm not able to reserve the ccTLD domains, I'll use subdomains for the .com site, for example us.mysitename.com, and I'll define in Google search console the geographic target for this domain.
Each domain will only be in the preferred language of each country (but the user will be able to change the language via cookies).
The content will be similar in all markets of the same language, for example, in the .co.uk and in .us the texts will be the same, but the product selections will be specific for each market.
Each URL will link to the same link in other countries via direct link and also via hreflang. The point of this is that all the link relevance that any of them gets, will be transmitted to all other sites.
My questions are:
- Do you think that there are any possible problems with this strategy?
- Is it possible that I'll have problems with duplicate content? (like I said before, all domains will be assigned to a specific geographic target)
- Each site will have around 2.000.000 of URLs. Do you think that this could generate problems? It's possible that only primary and other important locations will have URLs with high quality external links and a decent TrustRank.
- Any other consideration or related experience with a similar process will be very appreciated as well.
Sorry for all these questions, but I want to be really sure with this plan, since the company's growth is linked to this internationalization process.
Thanks in advance!
-
Thanks so much Gianluca, I'll take all your ideas into account.
-
You wrote this, and I'd like you to explain it better:
Each domain will only be in the preferred language of each country (but the user will be able to change the language via cookies).
Why people - for instance Italians - should be even feeling the need to switch the language from Italian to English?
Sincerely, I find it useless.
What you should do is doing like Amazon does: let people visit whatever version they want. For instance (I live in Spain), when I am in the UK and I want to buy something in Amazon, I visit amazon.es. Even if Amazon knows that I'm in the UK, and advices me that maybe I may prefer to shop in the .co.uk website, it lets me stay, navigate and buy from the .es one.
You, then, say this:
Each URL will link to the same link in other countries via direct link and also via hreflang. The point of this is that all the link relevance that any of them gets, will be transmitted to all other sites.
This is not that true. At least, not literally. In fact, the PageRank any page of yours will earn via internal and external links will just partly be passed to the other country versions corresponding pages. This because the PageRank flows through every link present in a page, both internal and external links, and "evaporates" in case of nofollow links.
About your questions:
- Do you think that there are any possible problems with this strategy?
Overall it is correct (being the only doubt the "cookie" thing you talked about)
Is it possible that I'll have problems with duplicate content? (like I said before, all domains will be assigned to a specific geographic target)
If you use the hreflang, you should not have issues related to duplicated content.
Each site will have around 2.000.000 of URLs. Do you think that this could generate problems? It's possible that only primary and other important locations will have URLs with high quality external links and a decent TrustRank.
Having millions of URLs should not be a problem... if it was so sites like Etsy, Home Depot or Amazon would be suffering it, wouldn't they? When it comes to Big Sites, the most important thing is having a very solid architecture and work very well everything internal linking.
Any other consideration or related experience with a similar process will be very appreciated as well.
When implementing the hreflang annotations, try not using as many hreflang as country versions are present.
In other words, apart the home page (for obvious localized brand visibility and for avoiding having, for instance, the .com version outranking the local one for being more authoritative), in the internal pages use only the hreflang annotation in order to suggest Google what version to show in case of countries sharing the same language.
For instance, let's take that www.dominio.com/page-a is in English and targeting the USA, then the hreflang annotation would be only relative to all the others URLs of pages in English and targeting others English speaking countries, but you should not add the annotation for the spanish speaking versions or italian.
Why? Because the languages are different and such a strong signal that you don't need to explain to Google that it should present to Spanish speaking users in Spain the URL of the spanish country version instead of the American English one.
-
Thanks Dmitrii.
Any other opinions will be appreciated aswell, this process is really important for this webpage.
-
Hi there.
Everything seems good to me. Just make sure that you use proper hreflangs or canonicals for content, which can potentially be duplicate, make sure that you have proper/correct sitemap and there are no problems with crawlability and accessability.
Good luck
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
-
Multilang site: Auto redirect 301 or 302?
We need to establish if 301 or 302 response code is to be used for our auto redirects based on Accept-Language header. https://domain.com
International SEO | | fJ66doneOIdDpj
30x > https://domain.com/en
30x > https://domain.com/ru
30x > https://domain.com/de The site architecture is set up with proper inline HREFLANG.
We have read different opinions about this, Ahrefs says 302 is the correct one:
https://ahrefs.com/blog/301-vs-302-redirects/
302 redirect:
"You want to redirect users to the right version of the site for them (based on location/language)." You could argue that the root redirect is never permanent as it varies based on user language settings (302)
On the other hand, the lang specific redirects are permanent per language: IF Accept-Language header = en
https://domain.com > 301 > https://domain.com/en
IF Accept-Language header = ru
https://domain.com > 301 > https://domain.com/ru So each of these is 'permanent'. So which is the correct?0 -
MultiRegional site indexing problems
Hello there!!! I have a multiregional site and dealing with some indexing problems. The problem is that google have only indexed our USA site We have: -set up hreflang tags -set up specific subdirectories https://www.website.com/ (en-us site and our main site) https://www.website.com/en-gb https://www.website.com/en-ca https://www.website.com/fr-ca https://www.website.com/fr-fr https://www.website.com/es-es ..... -set up automatic GEO IP redirects (301 redirects) -created a sitemap index and a different sitemap for each regional site -created a google webmaster's tool for each country targeted -created translations for each different language and added some canonicals to the US' site when using English content. The problem is that Google is not indexing our regional sites. I think that the problem is that google is using a US bot when spidering the site, so it will be always redirect to the US version by a 301 redirect. I have used fetch as google with some of our regional folders and asked for "Indexing requested for URL and linked pages", but still waiting. Some ideas?? changing 301 to 302? Really don't know what to do. Thank you so much!!
International SEO | | Alejandrodurn0 -
International Site Merge
Hello, I've never had to deal with an international site before, let alone a site merge. These are two large sites, we've got a few smaller old sites that are currently redirecting to the main site (UK). We are looking at moving all the sites to the .com domain. We are also currently not using SSL (on the main pages, we are on the checkout). We also have a m.domain.com site. Are there any good guides on what needs to be done? My current strategy would be: Convert site to SSL. Mobile site and desktop site must be on the same domain. Start link building to the .com domain now (weaker link profile currently) What's the best way of handling the domains and languages? We're currently using a .tv site for the UK and .com for the US. I was thinking, and please correct me if i'm wrong, that we move the US site from domain.com to domain.com/us/ and the domain.tv to domain.com/en/ Would I then reference these by the following: What would we then do with the canonicals? Would they just reference their "local" version? Any advice or articles to read would really be appreciated.
International SEO | | ThomasHarvey0 -
Footer pages on international sites
Hi guys, i have a question about footer indexed pages like about us, frequently questions, press or ads with us, among others. I'd like to put the same page in our website of .com.mx but i don't know how because i think it will be duplicate content. should i create new content for these pages? Thanks, J
International SEO | | pompero990 -
International Sites - Sitemaps, Robots & Geolocating in WMT
Hi Guys, I have a site that has now been launched in the US having originally just been UK. In order to accommodate this, the website has been set-up using directories for each country. Example: domain.com/en-gb domain.com/en-us As the site was originally set-up for UK, the sitemap, robots file & Webmaster Tools account were added to the main domain. Example: domain.com/sitemap.xml domain.com/robots.txt The question is does this now need changing to make it specific for each country. Example: The sitemap and robots.txt for the UK would move to: domain.com/en-gb/sitemap.xml domain.com/en-gb/robots.txt and the US would have its own separate sitemap and robots.txt. Example : domain.com/en-us/sitemap.xml domain.com/en-us/robots.txt Also in order to Geolocate this in WMT would this need to be done for each directory version instead of the main domain? Currently the WMT account for the UK site is verified at www.domain.com, would this need reverifying at domain.com/en-gb? Any help would be appreciated! Thanks!
International SEO | | CarlWint0 -
Subdomains or subfolders for language specific sites?
We're launching an .org.hk site with English and Traditional Chinese variants. As the local population speaks both languages we would prefer not to have separate domains and are deciding between subdomains and subfolders. We're aware of the reasons behind generally preferring folders, but many people, including moz.com, suggest preferring subfolders to subdomains with the notable exception of language-specific sites. Does this mean subdomains should be preferred for language specific sites, or just that they are okay? I can't find any rationale to this other than administrative simplification (e.g. easier to set up different analytics / hosting), which in our case is not an issue. Can anyone point me in the right direction?
International SEO | | SOS_Children0 -
Best practice for multi-language site?
Recently our company is going to expand our site from just english to multi-language, including english, french, german, japanese, and chinese. I deeply understand a solid and feasible plan is pretty important, so I want to ask you mozzers for help before we taking action! Our site is a business site which sells eBook software, for the product pages, the ranks are taken by famous software download sites like cnet, softonic, etc. So the main source of our organic traffic is the guide post, long-tail keywords. We are going to manually translate the product pages and guide post pages which targeting on important keywords into other languages. Not the entire english site. So my primary question is: should I use the sub-domain or sub-category to build the non-english pages? "www.example.com/fr/" or "fr.example.com"? The second question: As we are going to manually translate the entire pages into other languages, should I use the "rel=alternate hreflang=x" tags? Because Google's official guideline says if we only translate the navigations or just part of the content, we should use this tag. And what's your tips for building a multi-language site? Please let me know them as much as possible Thanks!
International SEO | | JonnyGreenwood0 -
Best domain for spanish language site targeting ALL spanish territories?
hi, we're have a strong .com domain and are looking to launch a site for spanish speakers (ie latin america + spain). we already have various subdirectories for some foreign language sites (eg. ourdomain.co.uk, us.ourdomain.com, ca.ourdomain.com, ourdomainchina.com, ourdomainindia.com etc) we already have a B2B site ourdomain.com-es which will remain the same. I'm thinking best practice would be to launch translated copy for the following: ourdomain.com/es ourdomain.com/cl ourdomain.com/mx ourdomain.com/pt etc etc firstly is this the best option? secondly, i'm really interested to hear whether there is a less time/resource intensive route that would give us visibility in ALL spanish speaking territories? Also - if we go with just one of the above (eg ourdomain.com/cl) how likely are we to get traction in other spanish speaking territories? any help much appreciated!
International SEO | | KevinDunne0