Language/country redirect best practice?
-
Hi,
What is SEO best practice when it comes to redirecting users from www.domain.com to their specific language/country, let's say www.domain.com/de for Germany?
From what I heard in on of the whiteboard fridays, it seems to be Javascript based on IP and browser language, and then set a cookie - correct?
Or should we let our users manually select their language/country at the first visit?
Any suggestion appreciated, thanks!
-
I recommend avoiding javascript redirects as they can be considered cloaking.
Here's an idea: show the English language homepage by default, but determine the user's preferred language (from the accept-language header sent by the browser). If your site supports the identified language, include & display a hyperlinked text-box/graphic-banner suggesting the visitor "view this site in {the user's identified language}" which links to the homepage for that language.
Useful links for reference:
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
-
Best Nofollow Practice Facing +500 instances of affiliate links
Hi. I have a set of affiliate links on my website. That's 50 unique links in total. They are placed in a separate folder /go/, and are all nofollowed. My website has 100 pages. When doing a site audit I get a report with 50 affiliate links pr. page x100. That's a huge report. Is this really necessary? I can ofc. choose to ignore the automated reports, but I can't help but to think that there must be an easier way to keep track of it? Like, if Link 1-50 is located in /go/, they should automatically be nofollowed, regardless of where they are located on the root/sub domain. Bonus question: The format of the link is https://exampledomain.com/go/brandname I am wondering if I should add that "/" at the end of it. If yes, why? If no, why?
Technical SEO | | Dan-Louis0 -
URL structuring / redirect question
Hi there, I have a URL structuring / redirect question. I have many pages on my site but I set each page up to fall under one of two folders as I serve two unique markets and want each side to be indexed properly. I have SIDE A: www.domain/FOLDER-A.com and SIDE B: www.domain/FOLDER-B. The problem is that I have a page for www.domain.com and www.domain/FOLDER-A/page1.com but I do NOT have a page for www.domain/FOLDER-A. The reason for this is that I've opted to make what would be www.domain/FOLDER-A be www.domain.com and act the primary landing page the site. As a result, there is no page located at www.domain/FOLDER-A. My WordPress template (Divi by Elegant Themes) forced me to create a blank page to be able to build off the FOLDER-A framework. My question is that given I am forced to have this blank page, do I leave it be or create a 302 or 307 redirect to www.domain.com? I fear using a 301 redirect given I may want to utilize this page for content at some point in the future. This isn't the easiest post to follow so please let me know if I need to restate the question. Many thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | KurtWSEO0 -
Best practice for URL - Language/country
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?
Technical SEO | | Kilgray1 -
Best practice when reducing the number of pages
Hi guys, I have recently changed one of our sites pages from having 1 main department page that links off to 6 others to showing all the products on one long page in an effort to have one authoritative page for this product type that can then be promoted on its own rather than promoting 7 pages and thus watering down any value. My question is now I have removed the links to the old pages should I just delete these pages altogether and setup redirects or should I leave them up as individual landing pages for those smaller product groups? If you look at the page below you can still access the smaller pages from the links in the jquery banner. http://www.orderblinds.co.uk/dept/wooden-venetian-blinds_d0161.htm Thank you in advance, Matt
Technical SEO | | OrderBlinds0 -
How should I set up a domain redirect
A client has 2 domains that he wants to use for the same site. At the moment one domain is just an abbreviation of the main domain (not sure why) as follows: www.mygreatpropertycompany.com
Technical SEO | | davidmaxwell
www.mgpc.com (just redirects to the above) He is complaining that when he searches for 'mpc' there are no results (at all) so I'm wondering what the best approach is.There is currently nothing on the main domain that refers to 'mgpc' in it's abbreviated sense - the only place it's being used is the company's email addresses (info@mgpc.com). The redirect is simply a html file in the root of www.mgpc.com as follows: Is there anything I can do to help him out? (this is one of those 'doing a friend a favour' tasks!) Thanks!0 -
Best practices for switching site languages around
Hi folks. The site in question is at http://bit.ly/UDV186 It is split into English and Spanish versions, each at root/en and root/es respectively. The home page is in Spanish. We're trying to rank the site for English keywords so we want to switch the homepage to English and put the Spanish version as secondary. What are the best practices for this? Can we just literally swap the two versions around onto the existing URLs, i.e. take the English text and put it onto the home page? Provided all links point to the correct page, would that be fine? Are there any other best practice considerations to take? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | MattBarker0 -
Redirect questions
Hi! A client of mine have created a new site with a new URL structure which they launched the other day. They have done a 301 redirect on all pages on the old site to the start page on the new site. E.g:
Technical SEO | | lojdqvist
www.olddomain.com/subfolder1/index.html -> www.newdomain.com
www.olddomain.com/subfolder2/index.html -> www.newdomain.com I'm thinking of fixing this now so the redirect instead looks someting like this:
www.olddomain.com/subfolder1/index.html -> www.newdomain.com/newsubfolder1/index.html
www.olddomain.com/subfolder1/index.html -> www.newdomain.com/newsubfolder1/index.html Two questions: 1. Is it worth doing the latter kind of redirect in all cases (after all, it involves quite a lot more work compared to the first solution)? or do you recommend the first solution for all redirect projects?
2. Now that they have already done the first solution, is it at all worth amending this to the latter or is everything spoiled now that they have already gone ahead with the first solution? Many thanks in advance!0 -
301 redirect
We have just had an outside SEO agency report on our site: One of things brought up were arounf broken links, and how they class them as broken links. Could any body tell me whether this statement holds true please, as I am not aware of this "Our latest intelligence shows that google are downgrading ranking from sites that feature 301 redirects within the internal link structure". Any help would be greatly appreciated Regards
Technical SEO | | Yozzer0