I'm about to launch a blog in a multilingual website.
The website uses geotargeting: site.com/fr/ for france, /be/ for belgium, ch for switzerland, ...
I was wondering if the blog should be run in root level: site.com/blog/
in that case, how the blog could be geotargeted?
Thanks a lot
You should have different URLs for each region/language. For example:
example.com/fr/blog or
example.com/be/blog
Or, even:
example.com/blog/fr or
example.com/blog/be
That depends on you. The main thing is to separate URLs for different languages/regions.
After you do all this, you should add hreflang attributes. That way you tell Google what version of a URL should be displayed when someone searches in certain language/from certain region.
If you use hreflang, you don't have to set geotargeting in WMT. If you still want to do that, you should add separate folders to WMT as different websites.
Related
I have a scrapy project which crawls all the internal links of a given website. This is working fine, however we have found a few situations where we want to limit the crawling to a particular section of a website.
For example, if you could imagine a bank has a special section for investor information, e.g. http://www.bank.com/investors/
So in the example above, everything in http://www.bank.com/investors/ only would be crawled. For example, http://www.bank.com/investors/something/, http://www.bank.com/investors/hello.html, http://www.bank.com/investors/something/something/index.php
I know I could write some hacky code on parse_url which scans the URL and does a pass if it doesn't meet my requirements (i.e. it's not /investors/), but that seems horrible.
Is there a nice way to do this?
Thank you.
I figured this out.
You need to add an allow() for the pattern you want to allow.
For example:
Rule(LinkExtractor(allow=(self.this_folder_only)), callback="parse_url", follow=True)
Everything else will be denied.
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
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.
So, we're trying to up our application in the rankings in the search engines, and one way our SEO guy told us to do that was to register similar domains...for example we have something like
http://www.myapplication.com/parks.html
so..we acquired the domain parks.com (again just an example).
Now when people go to http://www.parks.com ...we want it to display the content of http://www.myapplication.com/parks.html.
I could just put a forwarding page there, but from what i've been told that makes us look bad because it's technically a permanent redirect..and we're trying to get higher in the search engine rankings, not lower.
Is this a situation where we would use the Server.Transfer method of ASP.net?
How are situations like this handled, because I've defiantly seen this done by many websites.
We also don't want to cheat the system, we are showing relevant content and not spam or tricking customers in anyway, so the proper way to do achieve what i'm looking for would be great.
Thanks
Use your "similar" domain names to host individual and targetted landing pages that will point to your master content.
It's easier to manage and you will get a higher conversion rate.
Having to create individual page will force you to write relevent content and will increase the popularity of the page.
I also suggest you to not only build landing pages, but mini sites (of few pages).
SEO is sa very high demanding task.
Regarding technical aspects: Server.Transfer is what you should use. Never use Response.Redirect, Google and other search engines will drop your ranking.
I used permanent URL rewrite in the past. I changed my website and since lots of traffic was coming from others website linking mine, I wanted to have a permanent solution.
Read more about URL rewriting : http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms972974.aspx
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.