Wordpress Blog in 2 languages. How to SEO or structure it?
-
Hi Moz community,
I have got a wordpress blog currently in the spanish language. I want to create the same blog content but in english version. (manually translate it to english instead of using translation service such as Google Translate). How should i structure the blog for SEO? How will it work? Any structure markups i should know about?
Any examples?
Thanks
-
Just food for thought, another option is to host a Wordpress multi-site or even two separate versions of Wordpress, one for each language. I find this less complicated when it comes to plugin and template compatibility, plus you can control access a bit better.
Avoid using Javascript to translate text.
Avoid putting content in multiple languages on a single page.
Do link each page in one language to the translated page to avoid 404 errors. If your language selector automatically directs users from an www.site.com/en to www.site.com/es domain, make sure your URLs for translated pages match or you'll get a lot of 404 errors. This will hurt you a great deal.
-
Hola,
I assume your blog is a wordpress.org and not a wordpress.com one.
If so, install the WPML plugin, which (copying and pasting from its website) l_ets you do SEO for each language separately. You can set SEO attributes for the homepage, internal pages and categories for each language. Translations appear in their unique URLs and you can even put different languages in completely different domains. WPML follows Google Webmasters’ specifications for multilingual sites to the letter, letting your sites rank high on local search results. Of course, WPML is fully compatible with SEO plugins._
It will create a /en/ subfolder for the language you're translating your blog to, which seems to be your preferred solution (in other cases, i.e. a WooCommerce based on WP, it may be better using the domain option WPML offers too).
With WPML you will be able to translate everything, not just your posts (template, plugins et al).
The URL structure will mirror the main language one, but translated to English. So if you have something like www.myblog.com/seo/como-hacer-link-building, the English version will be: www.myblog.com/en/seo/how-to-do-link-building.
It also automatically implement the hreflang annotations (so you don't have to think about them).
It is compatible with WordPress SEO by Yoast, so every translated page/post can be finely optimized.
Honestly, even though the answer here above are correct (apart the "English post" category one, which is not really the ideal solution), I warmly suggest you to use WPML.
-
Can you elaborate on the duplicate content issue? Both are same content but in different languages.
I am thinking of
example.com/blog/en/urlgoeshere and example.com/blog/bm/urlgoeshere
What else should i be worried about?
Thanks
-
Hey Edmond,
Vic already answered with most of what I was going to say - a big thing to remember is the issue of duplicate content if you are making a direct translation. You probably want to keep all content under the same domain for potential future link-building efforts. Using the /en approach Vic suggested will help with this.
Bear in mind, however, that such an approach can result in duplicate content penalties (see: Panda) if you are not careful with the translation process. It might be better to paraphrase your content when translating it in order to avoid these penalties.
The rest depends on what aspects of the site you want to translate, where your markets are and what language your potential customers are likely to speak.
Feel free to touch base with any questions,
Rob
-
Hi, Edmond,
Is it just the blog content you’re looking to translate or the entire site?
If it’s the entire site, you may consider putting all of your English content under a /en/ subdirectory. For example: http://yoursite.com/en/englishcontentgoeshere.
As far as the blog by itself goes, I think you would be able to employ the same structure.
Alternatively, you may consider putting all of the English content under a Category called “Content in English” or something similar. This is probably the simplest approach.
One important thing to consider is your target market. Are you targeting English-speaking audience in U.S. or in other countries? Where is your Spanish-speaking site based at and who is your target audience? You will need to plan for that and localize accordingly.
Vic
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
-
Do I need to add the actual language for meta tags and description for different languages? cited for duplicate content for different language
Hi, I am fairly new to SEO and this community so pardon my questions. We recently launched on our drupal site mandarin language version for the entire site. And when i do the crawl site, i get duplicate content for the pages that are in mandarin. Is this a problem or can i ignore this? Should i make different page titles for the different languages? Also, for the metatag and descriptions, would it better in the native language for google to search for? thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lynetteboss0 -
Technical SEO
Hi Team, What are the points we are missing on our website from technical SEO front? http://www.giftxoxo.com/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Obbserv0 -
SEO Implications of Moving Blog to Subdomain
Hello, We are having some issues upgrading our stack and maintaining Wordpress for our blog. So we are thinking about splitting them up. What are the SEO implications of moving our blog to a subdomain? Our blog URL structure is currently something like https://www.aplossoftware.com/blog/p/2470/fund-accounting/yearend-closing-checklist/. We would like to change to something like https://blog.aplossoftware.com/p/2470/fund-accounting/yearend-closing-checklist/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | stageagent0 -
Ecommerce SEO URL Structure Questions
| I am in the process of developing a new Magento ecommerce store. Take for instance this website is in the apparel industry and i have the following main categories. Clothing Shoes Accessories Beauty Sub categories for clothing would be: Dresses Pants jeans Tops Products would be: Kelly Maxi dresses What is the best SEO Structure for this? Main categories obviously: www.example.com/clothing Sub Categories:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WayneRooney
www.example.com/clothing/dresses Or www.example.com/dresses (Zappos seem to pursue the second type) Products:
www.example.com/clothing/dresses/kelly-maxi-dresses/ Or www.example.com/kelly-maxi-dresses ? Which one would be the best way to structure your site? Also what about filters that available in category pages? Say if i were to filter by color. what would be the best URL? I am sure canonical tag is needed here. New to Ecommerce SEO so i need some guidance! |0 -
Tips for quick SEO
Hi guys (first time posting). I'm involved in many differnt marketing activities on an ecommerce site and don't always get a lot of time to focus on SEO (although I appreciate its importance). What are your tips for the most effective SEO tasks to focus on considering these time constraints? Think 80/20 applied to SEO. Thanks. Paul
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kevinliao0 -
Does the blog comments work?
Hi there, I have some keywords which varies difficulty from 1% -30 % . I can rank my urls with some blog comments from high pr blog pages? Is any way to rank them all fast? I am looking for the most cheap and easy way to rank them. One article of 1000 words lets say and some 200-300 blog comments are enough? Site is new, ranks for some other small keywords already.Has zero backlinks almost. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nyanainc0 -
Is DOCTYPE important for SEO?
Hello fellow Mozzers. I am just having a brief look at a potential clients website before speaking to them tomorrow and whilst looking at the source I noticed that they don't appear to have a clear definition for their Doctype. All the have at the top of each page is I have to admit that Doctypes aren't my strong point but I know that they are normally slightly more descriptive than this. Can this have any effect on rankings? or is this just an issue for W3C validation? Thanks 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdeLewis0 -
Hiring an SEO company
I usually do SEO myself but now its time to move on to getting on with running the business. I have found a fantastic PPC company who ONLY focus on PPC and am looking for same but for SEO. Must be based in UK and have a great portfolio of mid/large tier companies with some real life stats to back them up. Pricing must be clear and transaparent. Results must be measurable. How would you find such a company? Ironically searching on Google doesn't seem to produce the right results 😞 Alastair
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alastairc0