I got a multilanguage website.
I will have a lot of subdomain names, something like this: mysubdomain1.mysite.com, mysubdmoain2.mysite.com, mysubdomain3.mysite.com. Each one needs to be a multilanguage website, but for SEO reasons, which is the best/simple/clear method to define a subdomain/domain structure?
en = english version
1) en.mysubdomain1.mysite.com
2) mysubdomain1.mysite.com/en
3) mysite.com/mysubdomain/en
4) en.mysite.com/mysubdomain
5) mysubdomain.mysite.com/?hl=en
pt = portuguese version
1) pt.mysubdomain1.mysite.com
2) mysubdomain1.mysite.com/pt
3) mysite.com/mysubdomain/pt
4) pt.mysite.com/mysubdomain
5) mysubdomain.mysite.com/?hl=pt
Oracle uses:
http://www.oracle.com/global/au/
Yahoo uses:
http://au.yahoo.com/
Microsoft uses:
http://www.microsoft.com/en/us/
Google uses:
http://www.google.com/intl/es/
http://www.google.com/?hl=pt-BR
The only pattern you really need to worry about is consistency and cleanliness.
Stick to one, either folders or subdirectories, and keep it consistent throughout the use of your sites.
SEO is also about how it affects the user experience. When you pick a way of creating your language dependent URLs, keeping to a convention helps in that if a visitor landed on the Spanish language version, they could reasonably guess by changing some letters in the URL to read up on the English or German versions.
If you go with subdomains, you can target them with different IP addresses and the search engines may take into account where it is hosted in serving up relevant country/language specific results. You can't really do that with subfolders.
Subfolders can have the effect of filtering up any kind of link karma/authority to the main domain. Using subdomains might split that across and cause dilution.
I think sub folders are more popular. I have defintely seen them more in URLs.
Something like
http://www.domain.com/au/content/path
Proper SEO-wise solution is international sub-domains. Search engines treats subdomains as separate sites, and recognize each site's localization to display language-specific results.
Dedicated internationalized site performs better than "babylon"-like mixture of several languages.
Related
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.
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'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.
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.