Multilingual and Canonicalization
-
Hey there Mozzers,
If I have a site that is translated in 5 languages with main language as English ( most pages are only template translated top menu and footer ) is this correct?
Right now the main page which is example.com/en is mentioned 3 times in the href code 1st as a canonical later as alternate and 3rd as x default which seems a bit weird.
| |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| | | -
Hi!
My first (warm) suggestion is to allocate budget for content localization. Having just the template translated is not enough for having visibility in markets like Spanish, Chinese or Russian, and this is not just because you won't rank at all for queries in those languages (hence you won't be discovered by users in those markets), but also because English is not so known, so it is possible that people will bounce out very fast, and that is going to be a very bad user signal, one of those that Google more and more is going to take into consideration in its algorithm.
Said, that, you are doing right using the hreflang, because it is suggested by Google itself also for cases like yours, when only the template is localized:
- You keep the main content in a single language and translate only the template, such as the navigation and footer. Pages that feature user-generated content like a forums typically do this.
What I don't agree is about the use of the rel="canonical".
The combined use of hreflang and rel="canonical" is quite tricky in international SEO, so let me try to explain my negative to cross canonical use with hreflang.
The rel="canonical" is used to suggest Google that a page is identical to another one. Google, then, will not consider the canonicalized URL and show in the SERPs the canonical one only.
But with the hreflang you are giving Google a signal that is contradicting the rel="canonical" one.
In fact, you are telling Google two opposite things:
- Do not consider this URL because it is canonicalized to this other one;
- Consider this URL because I want you to show it in this specific market (i.e.: es-ES).
What Google must do?
My suggestion, then, is to quite the cross canonical and leave the hreflang annotation only.
Google, infact, finally is able to understand that - albeit the content may be substantially identical to the one present in another page - that specific URL targeting that specific international market has tiny differences that means a big changes in meaning (i.e.: currency) for that targeted market, hence Google won't consider it into a Panda schema.
I hope I was clear enough
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
-
multilingual asset/image names
I have several multilingual websites all with English asset names for images, do i need a set of images per language or use JASON to change the language image name for me? I know I need to provide alt tags / captions in all languages.
International SEO | | joemeza230 -
Problem to get multilingual posts indexed on Google
Last year on June I decided to make my site multi-lingual. The domain is: https://www.dailyblogprofits.com/ The main language English and I added Portuguese and a few posts on Spanish. What happened since then? I started losing traffic from Google and posts on Portuguese are not being indexed. I use WPML plugin to make it multi-lingual and I had Yoast installed. This week I uninstalled Yoast and when I type on google "site:site:dailyblogprofits.com/pt-br" I started seeing Google indexing images, but still not the missing posts. I have around 145 posts on Portuguese, but on Search Console it show only 57 hreflang tags. Any idea what is the problem? I'm willing to pay for an SEO Expert to resolve this problem to me.
International SEO | | Cleber0090 -
Multiregional / Multilingual SEO - What do you do when there is no equivalent page?
Hello, We're building out a small number of pages for the US in a sub-folder .com/us. The idea is to show US specific pages to users in that location. However, we also have a number of pages which we will not be creating for the US as they're not relevant. I am planning on geo-targeting the US folder to instruct the search engines that this subfolder should appear in the US SERPS but since it isn't an exact science, there is a chance that US visitors may land on these non-us pages which could potentially give them a bad user experience. What should we do in instances where a US user lands on a non-us page with no equivalent page? Any help would be much appreciated!
International SEO | | SEOCT1 -
Multilingual webshop SEO
Hi, I have a question concerning multilingual SEO for webshops. This is the case: the root domain is example.be, which has several subdomains. One of these subdomains is shop.example.be which is used for two webshops (Dutch and French), being shop.example.be/nl and shop.example.be/fr .
International SEO | | Mat_C
The other root domain is example.lu (for Luxemburg) which is only used for the subdomain for the Luxemburg webshop in French, being shop.example.lu/fr.
The content on the .lu/fr webshop is a small part of the content on the .be/fr webshop, and the product descriptions are the same and are both of course in French. The webshops will be redesigned and restructured, and the question is what to do with the .lu/fr webshop. There are two possibilities: Integrate this webshop for Luxemburg in the existing .be webshop, since most of the products are the same and the .lu webshop doesn't get a lot of visitors because of Luxemburg being a small country. The only thing to do then would be setting up a 301 from the .lu webshop to the .be/fr version to transfer link value.
People in Luxemburg already sometimes get pages from the .be/fr webshop in the SERP anyway because these already have a bigger authority than the .lu/fr pages. Keep the .lu/fr webshop and use hreflang tags so the correct pages with similar content are shown in the correct country. I know that when using different TLD's this normally isn't an issue anyway, so implementing hreflang tags even isn't really necessary. Please feel free to share your thoughts about what would be the best approach. Thanks!1 -
What strategy is better for a multilingual site for the SEO point of view?
Hi everyone, in a case for a site with two languages like spanish and english, how would do you deal with it? I can see 4 cases, which is better?? 1. With differents domains: mydomain.es (for spanish version) and mydomain.com (for english version). 2. With subfolder mydomain.com/es/ and mydomain.com/en/ 3. With Subdomain: es.mydomain.com and en.mydomain.com 4 With URL translation (any url is translated in ther languages but not use of subdomain or subfolder): mydominain.com/hola and mydomiain.com/hello Thanks very much for your answers (i love this forum). 🙂
International SEO | | webtematica0 -
Multilingual Sitemap with some non-matching URLs
The website has two languages, English (.com/en-int/) and French (.com/fr-fr/). Some pages only exist in French, and some only in English, but there are many that are a 1-to-1 match. So, my questions is, in the multilingual sitemap, should I only include the URLs that are alternates, and then create a 2nd sitemap for all non-matching URLs? Or should I have 3 sitemaps: 1) Multilingual sitemap for all matching URLs (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/26208650 , 2) English sitemap for only URLs not included in multilingual sitemap, 3) French sitemap for only URLs not included in multilingual sitemap. And then create a sitemap index file to link to all 3 sitemaps.
International SEO | | Alex.Weintraub0 -
Multilingual site - Best choice?
Quick question for a site that has the same content but in a different language (not machine translated) on seperate pages.
International SEO | | Crunchii
Say I have:www.mydomain.com (which is in English)
www.mydomain.com/ES (which is in Spanish)
www.mydomain.com/NL (which is in Dutch) I don't want to limit the ie. Spanish to only Spain so geotargeting isn't necessary What is the best/correct setup for the pages?0 -
Best URL structure for Multinational/Multilingual websites
Hi I am wondering what the best URL format to use is when a website targets several countries, in several languages. (without owning the local domains, only a .com, and ideally to use sub-folders rather than sub-domains.) As an example, to target a hotel in Sweden (Google.se) are there any MUST-HAVE indicators in the URL to target the relevant countries? Such as hotelsite.com**/se/**hotel-name. Would this represent the language? Or is it the location of the product? To clarify a bit, I would like to target around 10 countries, with the product pages each having 2 languages (the local language + english). I'm considering using the following format: hotelsite.com/en/hotel-name (for english) and hotelsite.com/se/hotel-name (for swedish content of that same product) and then using rel=”alternate” hreflang=”se-SV” markup to target the /se/ page for Sweden (Google.se) and rel=”alternate” hreflang=”en” for UK? And to also geotarget those in Webmaster tools using those /se/ folders etc. Would this be sufficient? Or does there need to be an indicator of both the location, AND the language in the URLs? I mean would the URL's need to be hotelsite.com/se/hotel-name/se-SV (for swedish) or can it just be hotelsite.com/se/hotel-name? Any thoughts on best practice would be greatly appreciated.
International SEO | | pikka0