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/
-
Hi Eva,
your case is quite similar to the Belgium one described in a answer here above.
Said that I did not see anyone pointing you to some important thing that you're maybe forgetting to do.
Your site is a .com, a generic domain name. Generic domain names target the world by default, and that is why you have a lot of visit from Mexico for your Spanish version of the site.
Therefore, what I'd suggest you to do this check:
- Go to Google Webmaster Tools;
- Go to: Search Traffic > International Targeting
- Click on the "Country" tab
- Control if the site is targeting the USA. If not, target users in United States.
Doing that, you are telling Google that your site is meant for users in the United States and not in others countries, so it won't have that much visibility in regional Googles like google.com.mx.
Then, as suggested by others here, implement the hreflang annotations (read the resources linked in the other answers).
In the specific case of the home pages (yes, both: English version and Spanish version), the annotation will be these:
These hreflang are telling Google:
-
This URL must be presented to all people using Spanish in the USA;
-
This other URL must be presented to all people using English in the USA.
-
Hi Eva,
The setup you describe is quite a standard approach in countries with multiple languages - and should work just fine, even without the hreflang attributes. Check this article from https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en. I live in Belgium - as we have 3 languages most sites have this configuration. On first visit -the user is offered a choice of preferred language, which is stored in a cookie. On subsequent visits - based on his previous choice the user is than redirected to the chosen language version
Adding the hreflang can help, but can also introduce new problems - you can check here how to avoid them -http://moz.com/blog/hreflang-behaviour-insights
Hope this helps,
Dirk
-
Hi Eva
Check out hreflang attributes. This should help you out! Here's another resource from Search Engine Watch.
Let me know if you have any questions or comments! Good luck!
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
-
My Website Not Showing In Google English Search Results
My website is not visible on Google English. Selecting the language of Google in Hindi, Spanish, etc., my pages are visible in search results.
International SEO | | Jude_Wix0 -
Which will rank higher: Non-mobile friendly site in native language vs. mobile friendly global site in English?
Hi, we are currently implementing a mobile site, e.g. m.company.com. The global mobile site will only be available in English. We have local subsites of the desktop site, e.g. company.com/fr. The local subsites are not mobile friendly. If a user does a search for a brand term in France, **which site will rank higher in SERPs? **If it will be the global site, is there anything we can do (other than making them mobile friendly) to make the local sites rank higher? Would it be the mobile-friendly site, even though it is only in English, because the local site would be penalized for not being mobile friendly? Or would it be the local site, because Google will give priority to the fact that it's in French, which matches the language of the person searching?
International SEO | | jennifer.new0 -
Website Domains, Geographical targeting and Duplicate Content
My colleagues in Holland have 2 websites. I've copied and pasted their question - my comments are at the bottom "www.ancoferwaldram.nl with NL, EN and FR language www.ancoferwaldram.com with only EN language The EN versions Google sees as “duplicate content” so we have to get rid of that. I think we better use 1 website: www.ancoferwaldram.com with NL, EN, FR and maybe other languages and deactivate www.ancoferwaldram.nl Or keep the www.ancoferwaldram.nl with only the NL language? Or keep the www.ancoferwaldram.nl with direct links to www.ancoferwaldram.com and no content?" The focus is to get the site to rank in Non-eu countries for export. So given the .nl has higher DA (though only about 15) would it be better to have seperate .fr, .be, .com sites for specific languages and geo targeting. Or would it be better to keep everything on the same site? If so which domain? i assume that the duplicate content can be resolved by stating which is the canonical version, once the domain strategy is resolved welcome any thoughts here. 🙂
International SEO | | Zippy-Bungle0 -
JavaScript IP-based redirection, best approach?
Hi everyone, What are the best practices for implementing Javascript redirections like on http://www.nike.com/ to send visitors to the right country section? I see it uses cookies and sessions to store the country and language, but what about search engines? Are they redirected via JS? Are there any risks that Google can't crawl everything? We had IP-based, server-side redirections on a few country-specific websites (purehazelwood.com, purnoisetier.fr, purnoisetier.com) that we had to remove because googlebot was always redirected to the US site and couldn't access the other sites. We instead added pop-ups if the visitor is accessing the "wrong" site but we'd like the redirection to be automatic. Is the javascript approach the best? Anything else we need to think about? Thanks for your time!
International SEO | | AxialDev0 -
What is the best NAP format to use?
Canadian client with a suite number in a shopping center. Does it matter if the NAP is the way it's displayed on Google Maps? Canada Post (or in the US, USPS)? Or does it only matter that all the citations are as similar as possible to one another? Canada Post says: 400-3033 IMMEL ST
International SEO | | rayvensoft
ABBOTSFORD BC V2S 6S2 But if I look that up on maps.google.com, it defaults to: 3033 Immel St Abbotsford, BC V2S 4L3, CanadaAnd the client does not appear in the list of about 20+ businesses at this address.Which should I use for Places (and I assume any other citation)?1 -
Why don't our English versions show up first?
If I google "greatfire" I find the Chinese version of our website (zh.greatfire.org) before the English version (en.greatfire.org). This is not on the Chinese-language version of Google. Why is this? Our site even has a language indicator () and also hints of where the English version is (). The same thing happens if I google "freeweibo". I find https://freeweibo.com but not https://freeweibo.com/en/, even though we indicate that's the English version (). Any ideas?
International SEO | | GreatFire.org0 -
New website coming soon
Currently I'm optimizing content for Anton Laurentiu and I'm doing some keyword strategy, link building... What would be the best way to target his photography and retouching services? He's based in Romania but also able to travel across Europe. Establish the website on the Romanian market (romanian language) or do a research at a larger scale? Thanks.
International SEO | | clotairedamy0 -
I have a site that has 65 different versions of itself.
I've just started managing a site that serves over 50 different countries and the entire web enterprise is being flagged for duplicate content because there is so much of it. What's the best approach to stop this duplicate content, yet serve all of the countries we need to?
International SEO | | Veracity0