I currently have a website running under a German domain .de (www.mysite.de)
I'm adding now Internationalization support for English and French languages.
The I18n will be handled by a different URL structure for SEO purpose
www.mysite.de/en will handle english related content
www.mysite.de/fr will handle french related content, and so on
My first question is if from a SEO prospective I should move the German related content under its own path as well (www.mysite.de/de)?
If this is the case, then should I do a 301 Permanent Redirect to the www.mysite.de/de when someone comes to www.mysite.de.
Online I can see different examples.
apple.com for example handles US traffic and apple.com/fr the french one for example.
spotify.com has a 302 Temporary Redirect in place that forwards you to a specific language site like spotify.com/us for US
I know that Google lets you specify somehow the language target associated to a specific URL in your site with something called 'Search Console geotargeting'. This is allowed just for gTLD domains so I can not do it with mine as it uses specific German country domain (.de). I'm wondering if there is something I would need to configure on Google side using the webmaster tool or if hreflang metatag will be enough to signal that for example all pages under /fr are for French related searches
Proper implementation of hreflang is enough in your case.
My first question is if from a SEO prospective I should move the
German related content under its own path as well (www.mysite.de/de)?
Not necessarily. It's a matter of setting correct paths in hreflangs.
I'm wondering if there is something I would need to configure on
Google side using the webmaster tool
Just make sure you don't configure your site for german audience only, leave it to international.
Related
I have a website with two languages, which works in this format:
example.com/changelanguage.xx?lang=de
and redirects to German language
and calling the same URL again like:
example.com/changelanguage.xx?lang=en
redirects to English language.
The URL remains the same example.com after redirection, just the language changes.
How to add the hreflang attribute here (for Google indexing)?
It’s a bad practice to use the same URL for different (i.e., translated) content.
Consumers, like search engine bots, would use rel-alternate + hreflang markup to find translations. For this to work, you have to provide a different URL for the translated page.
From the perspective of the search engine, it doesn’t work for their users if using the same URL: when they give http://example.com/foobar as search result, they want to make sure that their users get the language the search engine intended (e.g., someone searching for German terms should get the German page). But with your system, this doesn’t work; the search engine user might end up with the English version.
Instead, you should represent the language in the URL, e.g. the language code as first path segment:
http://example.com/en/contact
http://example.com/de/kontact
(Or use different domains/subdomains, or add a query parameter, etc. If you can make sure that translated pages would never have the same URL slug, you could even omit the language codes.)
This is a year late but https://www.bablic.com/ do exactly this!
Furthermore they can automatically detect the language set in the user's browser and automatically show the user your website in that language!
Recently I made my site to reroute the url, based on the language set in the visitors browser. So if a Swedish visitor came to the site, he was rerouted to mysite.com/sv, and an english visitor to mysite.com/en.
Soon after I released this, my Google rank just plummeted. So how did I go wrong here? Is there some common practice to auto-redirect of visitors based on their locale that doesn't hurt SEO, or do I need to set some kind of HTTP code for this to be approved by search engines?
The penalty you've acquired is for cloaking.
Short answer: Don't do redirects yourself - instead use hreflang codes and canonical links, then let the person's Google settings decide.
A Swedish person searching on google.com wants the English version, even if their browser is Swedish. Google does checks where it uses different user agents from different locations to test if you're serving the same content they see to everyone else. When this differs, your site gets flagged for attempting to hide it's true content - hence 'cloaking'.
More here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66355?hl=en
Something is not clear, here is my case:
i want to have have the same content for us and uk people,
could i safely avoid duplicate content with thoses url:
www.example.us/info.html (hosted on us server)
www.example.co.uk/info.html (hosted on uk server)
from google :
Websites that provide content for different regions and in different languages sometimes create content that is the same or similar but available on different URLs. This is generally not a problem as long as the content is for different users in different countries. While we strongly recommend that you provide unique content for each different group of users, we understand that this might not always be possible. There is generally no need to "hide" the duplicates by disallowing crawling in a robots.txt file or by using a "noindex" robots meta tag. However, if you're providing the same content to the same users on different URLs (for instance, if both example.de/ and example.com/de/ show German language content for users in Germany), you should pick a preferred version and redirect (or use the rel=canonical link element) appropriately. In addition, you should follow the guidelines on rel-alternate-hreflang to make sure that the correct language or regional URL is served to searchers.
Seems not clear for me, what do you think about my case ?!
flau
Go for hreflang. When implemented properly, you will avoid all duplicate content issues.
if you're providing the same content to the same users on different URLs (for instance, if both example.de/ and example.com/de/ show German language content for users in Germany), you should pick a preferred version and redirect (or use the rel=canonical link element) appropriately. In addition, you should follow the guidelines on rel-alternate-hreflang to make sure that the correct language or regional URL is served to searchers
That covers your scenario:
Choose one as your preferred URL for the US and make it redirect (or use canonical), and
Follow hreflang guidelines: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en
I have a question re: cloaking.
I have a friend who has a business in Canada and the UK.
Currently the .ca site is hosted on Godaddy. The co.uk domain is registered (with uk ip address) with domainmonster and is using a cloaked/framed redirect to the .ca site.
As a result (my assumption) the .ca site is indexed fine by google, the .co.uk is not.
The content is generic for both sites. How do I point the .co.uk site directly to the content independently (preferably without duplicating the content hosting in the UK), so that for instance if the .ca domain was taken away altogether the .co.uk domain would remain an entity in itself from Google's point of view?
Does Google index a generic set of content and then associate different country domains with that content?
I hope I have explained this ok.
Thanks,
Greg
What exactly do you mean by cloaked/framed redirect? Implementation of this may vary and this will result in different states of your site with search engines.
Best way to see how Google has indexed your site is to run site:youdomain.co.uk query and see what results are returned(check cached versions, etc.). Also make sure to create Google WebMaster Tools account and look through the info there.
If only one of your sites is indexed I suggest first to create 2 different accounts in Webmaster tools, specifying different geo targeting for them and removing the redirect, such that each site returns 200 response code and doesn't do any type of cloaking/redirecting.
If one of the sites is failed to be indexed, put a link to it from the other one, and a bit of simplest link building(submit to DMOZ, Yahoo Directory for instance) as well make sure you submit the different sitemap for both sites(again via Google Webmaster Tools).
Hope this answers your question.
Is it possible to get two "editions" of a website both indexed by the major search engines (Google/Yahoo/Bing/Teoma) which differ in content language only and are hosted under different TLDs?
Say English content is available at "http://domain.com/", German content at "http://domain.de/". Now, if e.g. Google.com is used I want it to list the "domain.com" entry and vice versa. Is "Duplicate Content" an issue here?
Depending on website software you use (wordpress, joomla, custom, etc), you might have a plugin or addon for each that supports multiple domains and search-engine pinging/seo. If that's the case, it should be possible.
I'm assuming your website layout is the same but you have a ".com" and ".de" TLD pointing to the same directory/software installation and a (auto?) language selector to choose between English and German.
Edit: (for quick readers)
It shouldn't need separate webspace for each site. What I do for my sites to get them submitted is use Sitemaps. I've never generated one myself, so I can't help in that aspect. However, you could generate sitemaps for each language (e.g. sitemap.en.xml.gz | sitemap.de.xml.gz) and have your application ping search engines with these sitemaps. Essentially, you'll have the same content but in different languages and it'll be in a sitemap which can be submitted to google/bing/yahoo/etc.
I used this method on a wordpress blog I had and every time I submitted/changed content, it would re-generate sitemaps (updating links/etc) and ping the search engines again.