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
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!
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.
Hope someone will give me a hand with this problem I have. So here it goes.
There is a website with integrated vBulletin forum inside. The forum is accessible through
https://site.de/forum domain. The main site itself has many other domains based on locale. That is to say, there is a https://site.ch, https://site.it, https://site.at, etc (each one is in corresponding language).
Now there is a need to have this forum under at least 2 of this additional domains. I mean, there should be https://site.ch/forum domain, wich will contain the same forum, but with some differences in style and, of course, will have working inside-forum links with it's own domain (site.ch). The whole system is to be SEO-ed also.
So now my question is how to achieve this? I know there are some sort of plugins to manage multi-domain access, but they are not supported and are still in beta version.
At first, how to setup the forum to work under multiple domains?
And then, maybe I need to manually change some code to set the $vbulletin->options['bburl'] that is used to generate the links inside forum?
And the last one, how do I make all this search engine optimized??
You're asking numerous questions, you might get better results if you created a separate question for each of:
1) How to use one forum directory for multiple domains? (with the vbulletin tag and the tag for the web server you are using)
2) How to set the language based on the current domain in vbulletin? (with the vbulletin tag and one or more of these tags: localized, locale, multi-language, multilanguage)
3) Best practices for duplicate content presented in multiple languages on multiple domains (with the seo and vbulletin tags)
Some Answers:
1) If you're using the apache web server, you could add something like this to your httpd.conf file:
Alias /forums /var/www/...xxx.../forum_directory // use the path to your forum directory, no trailing slash
<Directory /var/www/...xxx.../forum_directory>
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>
Then in the vbulletin ACP, change the setting for your basepath URL to "No":
Admin Control Panel -> Site Name / URL / Contact Details -> Always use Forum URL as Base Path
2) There are a few plugins that detect the language used by the browser and set vBulletin to use that language:
Language Detection
Set forum-language automatic to browser-language for first-time-visitors
3) SEO covers many things, but to deal with having duplicate content on multiple domains you can look at the Google Webmaster Central Blog.
This posting is helpful:
Working with multi-regional websites
A section from the post: Dealing with duplicate content on global websites
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 may not always be possible for all pages and variations from the start. 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), it would make sense to choose a preferred version and to redirect (or use the "rel=canonical" link element) appropriately.
I don't have anything on the other search engines.
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.
I'm looking for the best URL schema to use for a web app that has multiple versions, namely several languages and a simplified version for use by mobile phones - both aspects can be combined, so there's an English regular and mobile version, a German regular and mobile version, etc.
Goals (in order of importance):
User-friendliness
Search engine friendliness
Ease of development
Aspects to consider:
How should the URLs look like?
How should the user navigate between versions?
How much logic should there be to automatically decide on a version?
I'll describe my concept so far below, maybe some of you have better ideas.
My current concept:
When a new user arrives, the app decides, based on cookies (see below), the Accept-Language: header and the user agent string (used to identify mobile browsers) which version to show, but does not reflect this in the URL (no redirects)
It defaults to the non-simplified English version
There are prominently displayed icons (flags, a stylized mobile phone) to choose other versions
When the user explicitly chooses a different version, this is reflected both in a changed URL and a browser cookie
The URL schema is / for the "automatic" version, /en/, /de/, etc. for the language version, /mobile/ for the simplified version, /normal/ for the non-simplified one, and combinations thereof i.e. /mobile/en/ and /normal/de/
mod_rewrite is used to strip these URL prefixes and convert them to GET parameters for the app to parse
robots.txt disallows /mobile/ and /normal/
Advantages:
The different language versions are all indexed separately by search engines
Cookies help, but are not necessary
There'S a good chance that people will see the version that's ideal for them without having to make any choice
The user can always explicitly choose which version he wants (this makes the /normal/ URL necessary)
Each version has an URL which will display exactly that version when passed to others
/mobile/ and /normal/ are ignored by search engines; they would only be duplicate content.
Disadvantages:
Requires heavy use of mod_rewrite, which I find rather cryptic
Users could send their current URL to someone and that person, when visiting it, could end up seeing a different version, which could cause confusion
There is still duplicate content between / and /en/ - I can't disallow / in robots.txt - should I trust the search engines not to penalize me for exact duplicate content on the same domain, or disallow /en/ and accept that people coming to / via a search engine may see a different version than what they found in the search engine?
I suggest subdomains, personally.
I wouldn't include the mobile at all - use the useragent to determine this, and possibly a cookie incase the user wants to view the full site on their mobile (think how Flickr and Google do it). But for languages, yes - primary language at http://mydomain.com/, secondary languages at i.e. http://de.mydomain.com/ or http://fr.mydomain.com/
I am unclear why you would want to incorporate any kind of what you call versioning information, such as accept-language or user-agent, specific designation in the URL scheme. The URL scheme should be indicative of the content only. The server should investigate the various request headers to determine how to retrieve and/or format the response.