E-Commerce site in 2 languages - Duplicate content or not?
-
How does Google view this?
Our current site works like:
www.domain.com/EN - English
www.domain.com/ES - SpanishAll products are the same, just different language and different URL for them - is this good or bad?
I thought of either
- Going with .co.uk or .com for "English" and a .es for "Spanish"
OR - Subdomaining it. www.es.domain.com and www.en.domain.com
Any advice appreciated!
- Going with .co.uk or .com for "English" and a .es for "Spanish"
-
If you just want the language covered Mark's hreflang, coupled with a subdomain or subdirectory, is the way to go. I tend to lean subdirectory in that case but I've not heard anyone make a slam dunk case for either.
-
That´s great - but if I want to target more than just the country but anyone who speaks English or Spanish - eg., not just UK or Spain for example?
Would it still be wise to do it?
thanks!
-
That indicates the language of the page - hreflang does better, in telling the search engines these pages are related, are not duplicate content, but are the same product and targeting searchers in different languages. This is how I recommend to clients today to configure their multilingual sites - this works for folder, subdomain, or ccTLD setups
-
We run a .com and a .ca site. I highly recommend the ccTLD domains because, as the video Tom linked said, it sends a strong signal as to which site is for which country. Additionally, you don't need to worry about duplicate content because, as Matt says in this video, Google does pick up the ccTLD and filter by the appropriate region so you don't need to do anything extra.
-
What about using name="Language" content="en"/> ?? or es as the case may be?
-
Guys - both of your answers are very helpful.
Our site is translated by humans native to spanish and english - however, our market reach is not just UK or Spain, but any english speaker or spanish speaker - there are so many different countries that speak both.
Thanks again!
-
With different languages, it's fine to target them to different subfolders on the same domain - this way, you get the strength of the domain helping out each of the subfolders, and link building for one can help the other.
I would recommend in this case implementing the hreflang tag, indicating to the search engines that these pages are translations of one another and are meant to target different languages.
With your site targeting languages and not countries, I wouldn't geotarget the subfolders via Webmaster Tools, and I wouldn't necessarily go down the country specific TLD root, .com, .co.uk, .fr, etc.
I think using the hreflang tag here is your best bet - you can learn more about it here - http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077
This should eliminate any duplicate content issues and help your site's performance in both languages.
Good luck,
Mark
-
Hi there,
I run an eCommerce website and we don't actually change the language (even though we do ship to all of Europe aswell as England).
Mainly because of what Matt Cutts teaches us in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyWx31GeQWY
Unless you're committed to changing all of your product listings to the language in which you aim to sell in (manually) then it really isn't worth it.
I mean, by using a .fr domain name you're localising your website to just France, so you will only appear in Google.fr. But Google may pick your website up as "spammy" if the content is just thrown into a translator from English to French.
It's a lot of hard work if you're up to the challenge, but personally I'd stay away from it and if you do choose to do it, make sure you have a translator who can rewrite the pages into native French and not just generated french.
Hope this helps!
Tom
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
-
Hreflang tags and canonical tags - might be causing indexing and duplicate content issues
Hi, Let's say I have a site located at https://www.example.com, and also have subdirectories setup for different languages. For example: https://www.example.com/es_ES/ https://www.example.com/fr_FR/ https://www.example.com/it_IT/ My Spanish version currently has the following hreflang tags and canonical tag implemented: My robots.txt file is blocking all of my language subdirectories. For example: User-agent:* Disallow: /es_ES/ Disallow: /fr_FR/ Disallow: /it_IT/ This setup doesn't seem right. I don't think I should be blocking the language-specific subdirectories via robots.txt What are your thoughts? Does my hreflang tag and canonical tag implementation look correct to you? Should I be doing this differently? I would greatly appreciate your feedback and/or suggestions.
International SEO | | Avid_Demand0 -
International Sites and Duplicate Content
Hello, I am working on a project where have some doubts regarding the structure of international sites and multi languages.Website is in the fashion industry. I think is a common problem for this industry. Website is translated in 5 languages and sell in 21 countries. As you can imagine this create a huge number of urls, so much that with ScreamingFrog I cant even complete the crawling. Perhaps the UK site is visible in all those versions http://www.MyDomain.com/en/GB/ http://www.MyDomain.com/it/GB/ http://www.MyDomain.com/fr/GB/ http://www.MyDomain.com/de/GB/ http://www.MyDomain.com/es/GB/ Obviously for SEO only the first version is important One other example, the French site is available in 5 languages and again... http://www.MyDomain.com/fr/FR/ http://www.MyDomain.com/en/FR/ http://www.MyDomain.com/it/FR/ http://www.MyDomain.com/de/FR/ http://www.MyDomain.com/es/FR/ And so on...this is creating 3 issues mainly: Endless crawling - with crawlers not focusing on most important pages Duplication of content Wrong GEO urls ranking in Google I have already implemented href lang but didn't noticed any improvements. Therefore my question is Should I exclude with "robots.txt" and "no index" the non appropriate targeting? Perhaps for UK leave crawable just English version i.e. http://www.MyDomain.com/en/GB/, for France just the French version http://www.MyDomain.com/fr/FR/ and so on What I would like to get doing this is to have the crawlers more focused on the important SEO pages, avoid content duplication and wrong urls rankings on local Google Please comment
International SEO | | guidoampollini0 -
Google does not index UK version of our site, and serves US version instead. Do I need to remove hreflanguage for US?
Webmaster tools indicates that only 25% of pages on our UK domain with GBP prices is indexed.
International SEO | | lcourse
We have another US domain with identical content but USD prices which is indexed fine. When I search in google for site:mydomain I see that most of my pages seem to appear, but then in the rich snippets google shows USD prices instead of the GBP prices which we publish on this page (USD price is not published on the page and I tested with an US proxy and US price is nowhere in the source code). Then I clicked on the result in google to see cached version of page and google shows me as cached version of the UK product page the US product page. I use the following hreflang code: rel="alternate" hreflang="en-US" href="https://www.domain.com/product" />
rel="alternate" hreflang="en-GB" href="https://www.domain.co.uk/product" /> canonical of UK page is correctly referring to UK page. Any ideas? Do I need to remove the hreflang for en-US to get the UK domain properly indexed in google?0 -
Why has there been Massive increase in traffic to my clients .eu site after redirects were initiated?
Hi guys, This is a strange one thats really bugging me. I have a client that redirected their domain to a brand new domain that was already live for the previous two months. I have been trying analyse the data however I can't quite understand why there is a massive increase in visitors from the United States when the old site was redirected. The redirection took place at the beginning of July. It was badly managed in terms of the mapping of 301 redirects however thats not the issue here. The level of traffic is gradually decreasing I imagine due to the high level of bounces. The site in question is an EU funded website for education. The old site in the first 2 weeks of June received around 500 visits from the USA while the new site in the first 2 weeks of July (2 weeks into the redirects) received around 3,000 visits from the USA. The new site had previously received only 300 visits for the same period as the old site in the 1st 2 weeks of June. Any idea why this might be? Thanks Rob
International SEO | | daracreative0 -
Dynamic Google search snippet text based on user's language
On Google search results page, I want to show search snippet text (of my webpage) in Hindi language if user is user is using Google in Hindi language. If user chose another language on Google search page, my snippet text should be shown in that language. Is this possible? How?
International SEO | | Avinashmb0 -
SEO for Subdomains for different languages .com/fr, .com/es
Hi All, I was wondering how best to to approach optimisation of a site that exists on a single .com domain, but has different subfolders for different languages. The site is a .com and it has subfolders for French, Spanish, Russian and English. The business is situated in France and the vast majority of clients are French and English speakers. I've read that it's possible to geo target these subfolders using webmaster tools however I believe this is an inferior method of optimisation than having tld's. Just wondered if anyone had experience of htis and could provide any advice ? As they won't be rebuilding the site for another year or so I wondered if there were any quick wins? My second question is to do with how best to set these campaigns up within SEO Moz. would it be better to track at a subdomain or subfolder leverl (for different languages)? If someone could advise I would greatly appreciate it! Thanks, vantresca
International SEO | | vanvallejo0 -
Different Countries, Same Site
Hi All, I have recently been given the task of working on a website that sells products in the UK and America, at the moment the site does very well in the UK but does not perform very well in America which I believe is partly down to colloquialisms and difference in language. At the minute the site is a .com and is hosted in the United Kingdom, Does anyone have any useful tips on how to have 2 different versions of the site targeting different locations but using very similar language (Probably would be considered duplicate) Thanks in advance,
International SEO | | marcelo-2753980 -
Site structure for multi-lingual hotel website (subfolder names)
Hi there superMozers! I´ve read a quite a few questions about multi-lingual sites but none answered my doubt / idea, so here it is: I´m re-designing an old website for a hotel in 4 different languages which are all** hosted on the same .com domain** as follows: example.com/english/ for english example.com/espanol/ for **spanish ** example.com/francais/ for french example.com/portugues/ for portuguese While doing keyword search, I have noticed that many travel agencies separate geographical areas by folders, therefor an **agency pomoting beach hotels in South America **will have a structure as follows: travelagency.com/argentina-beach-hotels/ travelagency.com/peru-beach-hotels/ and they list hotels in each folder, therefor benefiting from those keywords to rank ahead of many independent hotels sites from those areas. What **I would like to **do -rather than just naming those folders with the traditional /en/ for english or /fr/ for french etc- is take advantage of this extra language subfolder to_´include´_ important keywords in the name of the subfolders in the following way (supposing the we have a beach hotel in Argentina): example.com/argentina-beach-hotel/ for english example.com/hotel-playa-argentina/ for **spanish ** example.com/hotel-plage-argentine/ for french example.com/hotel-praia-argentina/ for portuguese Note that the same keywords are used in the name of the folder, but translated into the language the subfolders are. In order to make things clear for the search engines I would specify the language in the html for each page. My doubt is whether google or other search engines may consider this as ´stuffing´ although most travel agencies do it in their site structure. Any Mozers have experience with this, any idea on how search engines may react, or if they could penalise the site? Thanks in advance!
International SEO | | underground0