Url for Turkish, Russian, Chinese, Arabic, Vietnamese and Arabic websites
-
Hello !
We gonna release our next website with new amazing languages.
However I was wondering, is it better to keep the url in English or I can translate them in :
- Turkish (should be fine)
- Chinese
- Arabic
- Vietnamese
- Arabic
- Russian
All websites are properly translated but I'm hesitating for the url.
Tks a lot !
-
6 Months later how well does it do ?
-
So what I did is:
Arabic, Turkish, Russian and Vietnamese URL are 100% translated. For chineses I followed my traductor advise and make in in Pinyin which is supposed to be the latin version of the chinese characters.
Let see how does google, Bing & Yandex like our website now !
-
Based on your previous answer I gonna translate them for a while and see how it's going on.
I think it's a good idea to translate all the URL as our main website is in English and all other are translations.
Never easy to go for those kind of projects.
Tks a lot !
-
The majority of websites I have seen that are for non-Latin language websites, such as Greek and the examples you give, have used URLs using the latin alphabet. Some of the URLs are spelt phonetically, others just use the English equivalent term.
I always like to look at news sites for these regions and see what URL format they use for these. If you look at http://www.newsru.com for Russia, http://alhayat.com/ for Saudi Arabia, you can see the format I mentioned being used.
Now, interestingly, the exception I keep seeing seems to be Wikipedia. Here is their Chinese (simplified) site: http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/ - click on a link there and you get Chinese characters in the URL.
But just look what happens when you try and copy-paste the raw URL: http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%89%A9%E7%90%86%E5%AD%A6 - you get this code instead of the characters. To me (albeit as a Westerner) this could cause problems when linking.
Ultimately, looking at just SEO, if you use latin or local characters it won't be the deciding factor for your performance. From a user experience point of view, you could make an argument for both cases. It certainly won't look out of place if you use latin characters in the URL as that is just the way of the web and indeed the majority of the websites in these regions use such a format. I'd have a look at websites in that region that are related to what you're looking at and see what structure they use. They might use English denominated URLs, or they might give latin-spelled, phonetic URLs (Greece is noticeable for doing this - they spell the word in latin characters as how it would be pronounced in Greek, something I like to call Greeklish). Make your decision based on the user experience, but when doing so take heed of the sites already out there and how they're approaching it and you won't go too far wrong.
Hope this helps.
-
That's also possible.
Check this post: http://uxmag.com/articles/a-url-in-any-language
In any language they will work fine due to Internationalized Resource Identifiers, when you copy paste them they might look weird because of that, but they will still work in a browser.
Edit: offering the URL also translated will be helpful for SEO too. Imagine a user searching for your site in their language, they will probably click on the one that it's written in their language that on the the one that has an English URL.
-
Hello
Tks for this answer. You're totally right for all latin languages, but what about the other ones ?
-
Definitely go for translating the URLs into their relevant languages. This was discussed in a previous thread which is worth looking at.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
Redirect entire website or not?
I have 2 websites: a UK health blog covering a wide range of topics (professional medical advice, diets, mental health), core business, strong brand, content ranks well, lots of valuable traffic, only 100 external links but all of good quality. We also sell some of our UK consultancy services on the site. small niche blog just covering fitness, every page has robots=noindex, 100x more traffic, 100% of traffic is from 500,000 external links on other websites talking about fitness matters (these range from spam to medium quality) , 95% of traffic is from countries we cannot serve, probably only 1% of the remaining 5% of traffic would be considered our target market, but the main concern is that the content is very out of date and should anyone see, it would be damaging to the UK health blog My dilemma is what do we do with the fitness website to make most business use, while ensuring little maintenance? Suggestions have been: Keep fitness blog running but make very basic content updates and remove robots=noindex Redirect fitness website urls to appropriate pages on UK health website We are on the verge of choosing option 2 but I have some SEO concerns about the impact of the redirects on the UK health website. Due to the volume of external links which mostly all reference 'fitness', is there any risk through redirects that Google might start thinking the UK health website is just about fitness? If so, is there any way to prevent this through certain redirects eg 307? Also with the fitness website having some spam related external links, is there any risk to the UK health website if these aren't disavowed before redirects are setup? If so, on which website should these be done? Thanks!
International SEO | | tah061 -
Is there a Risk Around Creating a Website for Each Country in The World?
Is there a risk around creating a website for each country in the world with similar to identical content depending on the language? We need to serve prices and the local currencies and be compliant with regulations. We're planning to use rel=canonical and HREFLANG tags to help with consolidation and GEO-targeting.
International SEO | | ari_seo0 -
Dual language in multiple URLs
Hi ! I wonder if anyone has ever experienced this problem before. One of our client is having some trouble with his multilanguage and international website. A small number of URLs contains 2 different language. Exemple : http://exemple.com/es-ar/productos/compression-baggers/empacadora-formacion-llenado-sellado/ The part in bold is in english and the rest in spanish.
International SEO | | PhilC-M
I need some help to find the source of the problem. The number of URLs like this doesn't stop to increase, but it remains under control. I temporarily implanted 302 redirects while trying to find the source of the problem and fix it. Thank you for your help.0 -
Multinational website - best practice
Hello, I am researching a lot on this subject and have read several articles here on Moz and elsewhere about the best practices for multinational websites. But I'm not yet convinced on what would be the best solution in my case. Today we have the following websites (examples):
International SEO | | WebGain
website.com which function as a global website.
website.dk which is for the danish market
website.no which is for the norwegian market Some of the content on these websites are the same (but different languages; english, danish and norwegian). We want to expand the business to more countries and work with ccTLDs. Both to countries which speaks languages that we don't have content for yet (an example could be Poland), but also more countries that speaks english, like Great Britain (with a .co.uk domain) and Australia (with a .com.au domain). We expect to expand in many countries (as many as it makes sense to do). I have read a lot about the alternative hreflang tag which would look like and that seems like a good solution, but I have a couple of questions that I hope you guys can answer: Should the alternate hreflang tags show every existing language versions including the one you're on or only show the alternative versions? Do we risk penalty by having identical or almost identical content for same language websites (could be UK and the global .com one) if we use the alternate hreflang tags? I'm aware that we should use the native spellings and sentences in each country. Would the sitemap solution be better in our case? We have the same link structure for all websites, but the sub-directories can differ due to their language (like /articles/ is /artikler/ in danish) - is that an issue? Will hreflang="en" function as global english? (so searching users that we don't have a local website for will see that).0 -
Best practice for Spanish version of English website?
I'm doing an audit for a site that has all of its English pages under the same roof with Spanish pages in Wordpress. It is intended for Chicago, not Mexico. I suspect this is not a good thing, but I only have instinct to rely on here. What is the best practice for having the same website in two languages? http://www.enhancedform.com/ and http://www.enhancedform.com/spanish/
International SEO | | realpatients0 -
Alternate tag. Anybody had success getting English websites only with localized currency served with alternate tag?
I have an English website with USD prices and US phone.
International SEO | | lcourse
Via currency dropdown visitors in Ireland can choose EUR as currency, visitors from Denmark Danish crown etc and via GEO IP I also serve local contact phone numbers. So I though it made sense to define this with the alternate tags, but now after several months google still does not pickup these pages in local searches. Did anybody have success with getting a website just with currency parameter ranked locally using the alternate tag? Does it help to have also static links (not only dropdown links) to currency versions on the page? Any other thing that could help to have google pick these up? Below my code sample:0 -
Multi Regional website - Folder strategy
Hello Seomoz people ! I've been struggling for some time now with an international website project. It's gonna be an:international website with joomla. To sum up: We have an international company The company has 13 subsidiaries worldwide (same products, different names) The company doesn't have enough resources to get 13 independent websites Some subsidiaries work in one country / one language, some others on a region (several countries, several languages) Thanks to your community we decided to: Get a main website company.com Get subsidiaries folders (middle east, oceania and south america will be easier to link to their subsidiary) .com/asia .com/middle-east .com/oceania .com/south-america .com/uk .com/usa .com/fr .com/es .com/de .com/ma .com/dz .com/it We also need to: Get some websites in different languages .com/asia-cn .com/asia-en etc. Now how do we do to manage: Regional websites (the first 4th on the upper list) Google allows to affect a website to a country not region Will they compete with the .com ? How do we set up them for google ? How do we avoid duplicate content and keep local ranking .com/asia-en/services1.html will have the exact same content that_.com/services1.html_ If we use canonical from _.com/asia-en/services1.htm_l to _.com/services1.html , d_oes that mean /asia will not rank in asia ? Hope you can help us to figure us the best solution for this good project ! Thanks a lot. Florian
International SEO | | AymanH1 -
Should product-pages with different currencies have different URLs?
Here is a question that should be of interest for small online merchants selling internationally in multiple currencies. When, based on geolocation, a product-page is served with different currencies, should a product-page have a different URL for each currency? Thanks.
International SEO | | AdrienOLeary0