English Site ADDING Spanish Version
-
I have an English wordpress site that I'd like to duplicate and translate in Spanish...does anyone recommend using a subdomain (espanol.xyz.com) or something like a .com/es/ format? I'm also interested in any SEO issues that might arise and want to keep SEO in mind while building this segment of the site. Any other tips or things to think of?
-
Hello! Glad to hear the project should soon be progressing!
I haven't worked with automated translation in a while, so I'm not sure how good an automated solution would be nowadays, but a native-speaker editor at the least is probably necessary (and perhaps optimal if the jargon is particularly unusual).
A story for an example: my father is a swimming coach and was teaching some Arabic speakers, so he tried to translate the training session (full of swimming jargon) into Arabic. Everything went surprisingly well, besides the translation of "distance per stroke." The tool didn't know that "stroke" in swimming means the same thing as "stride" in running, and the translation read "distance per heart attack."
-
@Jane,
Apologies for not replying (2 years) earlier.The project got delayed an other priorities took over.
I was thinking of translating via a plugin but preparing to eventually translate by hand because our industry has some very unusual technical jargon. Hopefully soon this project will progress soon.
Thank you for your response!
-
Definitely use the rel="alternative" tag, also referred to as the hreflang tag, if you plan on direct translations and pages that are basically the same thing in either language.
Two good resources: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en and http://moz.com/blog/using-the-correct-hreflang-tag-a-new-generator-tool.
I too would go for the subfolder option over subdomains for similar reasons to those Kevin mentions.
Are you translating the content by hand?
-
Oh man, multilingual Wordpress. Just got through with one and bounced through a few plugins. I finally settled on mQtranslate. Still, with the template that was chosen by the client, there was a lot to work getting all that squared away. There are usually settings in these plugins for pages and posts in each language to either skip missing translations or show the untranslated version. While you're probably safe from duplicate content because of the doc type lang declaration, it's still not a great user experience.
As far as domains are concerned, I'd definitely go with subfolders over subdomains simply because search engines will see all languages as a single site and not split rank between subdomains. Matt Cutts also recommends this approach if it's a technically viable option, but you can use alternate tags, lang tags, and other canonicalization methods to ensure both visitors and search engines get to where they want to be on your site.
One option you might want to consider is running a Wordpress Multisite with subfolders, one for each language. This keeps Wordpress content in different languages completely, absolutely separate and avoids the problems with plugins.
Hope this helps.
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
-
What do you think about SEO of big sites ?
Hi, I was doing some research of new huge sites for example carstory.com that have over million pages and i notice that many new sites have strong growing for number of keywords and then at some point everything start going down (Image of traffic drop attached) there are no major updates at this time but you can clearly see even on recent kewyords changes that this site start loosing keywords every day , so number of new keywords are much less that lost keywords. How would you explain it ? Is that at some point when site have more than X number of indexed pages then power of domain is not enough to keep all of them at the top and those keywords start dropping ? Please share you opinion and if you have any experience by yourself with huge sites. Thank You very appreciated 2LC3AxE
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | logoderivv0 -
Disavow files on m.site
Hi I have a site www.example.com and finally have got the developers to add Google webmaster verification codes for: example.com m.example.com As I was advised this is best practice - however I was wondering does this mean I now need to add the disavow file. Thanks Andy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Andy-Halliday0 -
Ranking a site in the USA
I'm UK based and looking at setting up a site to rank in the USA. As I understand it a .com TLD is best but these are used worldwide so do I simply need to set the geotargeting to USA in webmaster tools? Or is there a better domain to use? With hosting the site in US and on page content related to US cities (I plan to create a page for each US city I operate in the the city name in the H1 tag) will that be enough for google to understand that the page should rank in the US version of google. Also how can I view Google USA search results - when I go to google.com it automatically redirects to google.co.uk and I can only change the location on the left hand side to UK cities. Any help much appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0 -
I run an (unusual) clothing company. And I'm about to set up a version of our existing site for kids. Should I use a different domain? Or keep the current root domain?
Hello. I have a burning question which I have been trying to answer for a while. I keep getting conflicting answers and I could really do with your help. I currently run an animal fancy dress (onesie) company in the UK called Kigu through the domain www.kigu.co.uk. We're the exclusive distributor for a supplier of Japanese animal costumes and we've been selling directly through this domain for about 3 years. We rank well across most of our key words and get about 2000 hits each day. We're about to start selling a Kids range - miniature versions of the same costumes. We're planning on doing this through a different domain which is currently live - www.kigu-kids.co.uk. It' been live for about 3-4 weeks. The idea behind keeping them on separate domains is that it is a different target market and we could promote the Kids site separately without having to bring people through the adult site. We want to keep the adult site (or at least the homepage) relatively free from anything kiddy as we promote fancy dress events in nightclubs and at festivals for over 18s (don't worry, nothing kinky) and we wouldn't want to confuse that message. I've since been advised by an expert in the field that that we should set up a redirect from www.kigu-kids.co.uk and house the kids website under www.kigu.co.uk/kids as this will be better from an SEO perspective and if we don't we'll only be competing with ourselves. Are we making a big mistake by not using the same root domain for both thus getting the most of the link juice for the kids site? And if we do decide to switch to have the domain as www.kigu.co.uk/kids, is it a mistake to still promote the www.kigu-kids.co.uk (redirecting) as our domain online? Would these be wasted links? Or would we still see the benefit? Is it better to combine or is two websites better than one? Any help and advice would be much appreciated. Tom.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KIGUCREW0 -
Optimize a Classifieds Site
Hi, I have a classifieds website and would like to optimize it. The issues/questions I have: A Classifieds site has, say, 500 cities. Is it better to create separate subdomains for each city (http://city_name.site.com) or subdirectory (http://site.com/city_name)? Now in each city, there will be say 50 categories. Now these 50 categories are common across all the cities. Hence, the layout and content will be the same with difference of latest ads from each city and name of the city and the urls pointing to each category in the relevant city. The site architecture of a classifieds site is highly prone to have major content which is not really a duplicate content. What is the best way to deal with this situation? I have been hit by Panda in April 2011 with traffic going down 50%. However, the traffic since then has been around same level. How to best handle the duplicate content penalty in case with site like a classifieds site. Cheers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ketan90 -
Can this site be optimised?
I have been told that because of the technology this site was developed with it cannot be changed for example urls title and meta tags cannot be changed. why is that and what other types of sites also cannot be changed. http://www.alliedpickfords.com/Pages/Landing.aspx For example i have been told alot of online stores cannot be optimised because the urls change every time some one goes to the page therefor you cant lionk to a certain page is that true and what is the way around it if any.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | duncan2740 -
Press Release Sites
Ok, I am getting a lot of conflicting information about press release sites. i have been doing press release's for a while (mostly manually), I have also tried a few companies that claim to do it well (never do). After the Panda update the PR sites I have been using are just not as effective. Does anyone else have this problem or are there better PR sites that can be recommended.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TomBarker820 -
Building a mobile site.
We are building a mobile site that will be launching in another month. I’m concerned that the mobile site will start catabolizing our traditional rankings. Is there a way to keep this from happening? Should we utilize the cross domain canonical tag and point back to the traditional site URLs?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEO-Team0