What is the "Homepage" for an International Website With Multiple Languages?
-
BACKGROUND:
We are developing a new multi-language website that is going to have:
1. Multiple directories for various languages:
/en-us, /de, etc....
2. Hreflang tags
3. Universal footer links so user can select their preferred language.
and
4. Automatic JS detection of location on homepage only, so that when the user lands on /, it redirect them to the correct location.Currently, the auto JS detection only happens on /, and no other pages of the website. The user can also always choose to override the auto-detection on the homepage anytime, by using the language-selector links on the bottom.
QUESTION: Should we try to place a 301 on / to point to en/us? Someone recommended this to us, but my thinking is "NO" - we do NOT want to 301 /. Instead, I feel like we should allow Google Access to /, because that is also the most authoritative page on the website and where all incoming links are pointing. In most cases, users / journalists / publications IMHO are just going to link to /, not dilly dally around with the language-directory.
My hunch is just to keep / as is, but also work to help Google understand the relationship between all of the different language-specific directories. I know that Google officially doesn't advocate meta refresh redirects, but this only happens on homepage, and we likewise allow user to override this at any time (and again, universal footer links will point both search engines and users to all other locations.)
Thoughts? Thanks for any tips/feedback!
-
Hi Daniel,
Yes, I have read the entire article. Instead continuing to debate how much link equity in particular would pass through a homepage 301, or how reliable Google's "official stance" is, my goal is rather to evaluate the how the homepage holistically relates to the overall international SEO and corporate branding strategy, in tandem with a complex redesign that is already going to require us to switch up a ton of pages.
Thanks!
-
Hello Sarah,
I'm glad you replied. I would argue that the article proves my point more than rejects it. You might be coming from "A redirect from one page to an entirely different page will result in no PageRank being passed and will be considered a soft 404."
In this case "entirely different" refers to a page that has a different topic. Since in this case the page redirected to would be identical or nearly-identical to the original page, then the 301 redirect will transfer 100% of the rank of the original page.
Daniel Rika - Dalerio Consulting
https://dalerioconsulting.com/
info@dalerioconsulting.com -
Hi Daniel,
Thanks for the response! While I totally agree that Google's cool with 301s as of 2019, I do have to respectfully disagree that 301s pass 100% of all link equity. See: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/301-redirect-pagerank/275503/#close
And in the middle of a big redesign, I'm especially hesitant to 301 the current homepage. My own personal, anecdotal experiences (including from as recently as this year) likewise indicate that changing URLs leads to fluctuation, even with 301s to help migrate and mitigate.
In the meantime, IMHO, we really also don't want to force all users who land on / to immediately go to the English directory. Hopefully, geotargeting will take them to the best match - but even if it's not, then they can always override that by manually choosing their preferred language.
Personally, I was a bit thrown by the (external) recommendation to 301 / to /en-us. I needed to bounce ideas off other SEOs and unpack all of the pros and cons of doing so. Writing it all out here, and getting some feedback, has absolutely helped me to do that.
-
To put it plain and simple, in 2019 there is no reason to fear 301 redirects.
Back in 2013 and on, whenever you would do a 301 redirect you would lose some page rank along the way, estimated by some professionals at around 15% of the Page Rank. Nowadays, with the development and changes in the Google algorithm, you are assured by google that in doing a 301 redirect you will be able to transfer the rank and authority of the main homepage to the proper country-specific URL. You can support that by the fact that most of the multi-language site WordPress plugins will automatically do that for you as well.
You can consider the redirect to the other page the same as you would redirect Http traffic to Https or how you would redirect traffic from the direct name.com URL to the www sub-domain. My suggestion for you would be to go for the 301 redirect.
Alternatively, if you are still hesitant to use the 301 redirect, you have the option of using the site homepage as the English version of the website and using directories for the other languages, or to keep both the homepage and the en-us page with identical content, and inserting a canonical relationship tag to support one of the pages to grow in rankings without being marked as spam.
Daniel Rika - Dalerio Consulting
https://dalerioconsulting.com/
info@dalerioconsulting.com
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
-
URL structure for am International website with subdirectories
Hello, The company I am working for is launching a new ecommerce website (just a handful of products).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Lvet
In the first phase, the website will be English only, but it will be possible to order internationally (20 countries).
In a second phase, new languages and countries will be added. I am wondering what is the best URL structure for launch: Start with a structure similar to website.com/language/content (later on we will add other languages than english) Start with a structure similar to website.com/country/content
3) Start with a structure similar to website.com/country-language/content (at the beginning it will be all website.com/country-en/content) What do you think? Cheers
Luca0 -
What is best practice for "Sorting" URLs to prevent indexing and for best link juice ?
We are now introducing 5 links in all our category pages for different sorting options of category listings.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
The site has about 100.000 pages and with this change the number of URLs may go up to over 350.000 pages.
Until now google is indexing well our site but I would like to prevent the "sorting URLS" leading to less complete crawling of our core pages, especially since we are planning further huge expansion of pages soon. Apart from blocking the paramter in the search console (which did not really work well for me in the past to prevent indexing) what do you suggest to minimize indexing of these URLs also taking into consideration link juice optimization? On a technical level the sorting is implemented in a way that the whole page is reloaded, for which may be better options as well.0 -
"Unnatural links to your site" manual action by Google
Hi, My site has been hit by a "Unnatural links to your site" manual action penalty and I've just received a decline on my 2nd reconsideration request, after disavowing even more links than I did in the first request. I went over all the links in WMT to my site with an SEO specialist and we both thought things have been resolved but apparently they weren't. I'd appreciate any help on this so as to lift the penalty and get my site back to its former rankings, it has ranked well before and the timing couldn't have been worse. Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ishais
Yael0 -
List of SEO "to do's" to increase organic rankings
We are looking for a complete list of all white hat SEO "to do's" that an SEO firm should do in order to help increase Google/Bing/Yahoo organic rankings. We would like to use this list to be sure that the SEO company/individual we choose uses all these white hat items as part of an overall SEO strategy to increase organic rankings. Can anyone please point me in the right direction as to where we can obtain this complete list? If this is not the best approach, please let me know what is, as I am not an SEO person. Thank you kindly in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RetractableAwnings.com0 -
Parallax site with snippets of internal pages on the homepage
Hello, I am working on a parallax site that also has an internal landing page structure. The homepage includes snippets of the existing copy from some of the other internal pages. My question is what can I do to the homepage to prevent duplicate content in this situation? We aren't utilizing the entire landing page on the homepage just a few lines. Would it be possible to place a 'no-index, follow' tag on these sections? Thanks in Advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Robertnweil10 -
Can you recover from "Unnatural links to your site—impacts links" if you remove them or have they already been discounted?
If Google has already discounted the value of the links and my rankings dropped because in the past these links passed value and now they don't. Is there any reason to remove them? If I do remove them, is there a chance of "recovery" or should I just move forward with my 8 month old blogging/content marketing campaign.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Beastrip0 -
Fetch as GoogleBot "Unreachable Page"
Hi, We are suddenly having an error "Unreachable Page" when any page of our site is accessed as Googlebot from webmaster tools. There are no DNS errors shown in "Crawl Errors". We have two web servers named web1 and web2 which are controlled by a software load balancer HAProxy. The same network configuration has been working for over a year now and never had any GoogleBot errors before 21st of this month. We tried to check if there could be any error in sitemap, .htaccess or robots.txt by excluding the loadbalancer and pointing DNS to web1 and web2 directly and googlebot was able to access the pages properly and there was no error. But when loadbalancer was made active again by pointing the DNS to it, the "unreachable page" started appearing again. This very same configuration has been working properly for over a year till 21st of this month. Website is properly accessible from browser and there are no DNS errors either as shown by "Crawl Errors". Can you guide me about how to diagnose the issue. I've tried all sorts of combinations, even removed the firewall but no success. Is there any way to get more details about error instead of just "Unreachable Page" error ? Regards, shaz
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shaz_lhr0 -
Google ranking for the term "locum tenens"
Hello- My company is having a very difficult time performing well for the term "locum tenens". This term literally defines our industry and target market (temporary physician staffing, essentially) and is by far the most searched term in our industry (30k / month, give or take). For us, “locum tenens” is like “ice cream” is to Ben & Jerry’s. Of course, there are other keywords we're concerned with, but this is by far the most important single term. We've moved up to page 3 a few times since launching our redesigned site in April, but seem to continuously settle on page 5 (we've been on page 5 for many weeks now). While I didn’t expect us to be on page 1 at this point, I having a hard time understanding why we’re not on at least 2 or 3, in light of the sites ahead of us. We have a ton of decent, optimized content and we’ve tried not to be too spammy (every page does have locum tenens on it many times, but it describes our service – it’s hard not to use it many times). We are working on developing backlinks and are avoiding any spammy backlink schemes (I get calls every day from companies saying they can give me 400 backlinks a month, which I have a hard time believing is a good long term strategy). It just sort of seems like our site is cursed for some reason that I can't understand. We are working with a competent SEO firm, and still have not made much progress for this term. So, I’m hoping maybe the community here might have some helpful advice. Our site is www.bartonassociates.com. Any insight you guys may have would be GREATLY appreciated. Thanks in advance and have a great day. Jason
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ba_seomoz0