Multilingual Blog Structure
-
Hi
I have a domain in 20 languages. I want to integrate a wordpress blog (in subfolders) in the 3 most important languages like EN-ES-FR (actually they will be 3 independent blogs) and I want to know which structure is the best one.
OPTION 1
domain/en/blog/post1
domain/es/blog/post1
domain/fr/blog/post1
OPTION 2
domain/blog_en/post1
domain/blog_es/post1
domain/blog_fr/post1
Last question. For the rest of the 17 languages of my domain, can I put a link the english blog or is not recommended because maybe too many pages will be linking to the blog?
Thank you
-
Thanks a lot Jane
-
Hi Eduardo,
Ah - I understand. I don't see this as being a problem - many internal links like this have many thousands of links pointing to them internally and Google understands that this is the nature of internal linking. If you crawl a few other larger sites, including this one, with a service like ScreamingFrog (you'd need the paid version to see the full site crawl), you'll see that resources like this blog are linked to thousands of times, since there are thousands of blog posts from years ago, articles, tool pages, indexed Q&A pages etc.
Cheers,
Jane
-
I jane
Thank you for your answer. I will put the hreflang tag for each post created.
I am saying that for the german language (for which I won't have a blog in german) I will link it to the english, so to: domain/en/blog. And the same for each of the language for which I won't have a blog. For example:
domain/it/ will have a link to domain/en/blog
domain/ja/ will have a link to domain/en/blog
domain/nl/ will have a link to domain/en/blog
etc..
I am a bit afraid to do that because as I said before, among my 20 languages, only 3 languages will have their own blog while the rest of languages will link to the english blog.
I have other 17 languages on the same domain with about 190 pages / language, so if I put on the main navigation menu (header) a link to the english blog this means that I will create 3230 internal links the home page of the english blog. I don't know maybe it is too much and I should leave the rest of 17 languages without blog.
What do you think?
-
Hi Eduardo,
The use of the hreflang tag, also called the rel="alternate" tag, is perfect for what you are trying to do. This post talks about how the tag works and suggests various URL structures that work best.
Another good resource about the tag is here.
Regarding the links to the blog, are you saying that there will be a link to domain/de/blog/, even if you do not have a German blog, linked to from the German section of the site?
-
Hi andy
I already have a drop down menu to change to any of the 20 languages. What I plan to to for the rest of 17 languages which won't have a specific blog (because I don't have 20 native speakers) is to add to the main navigation menu a direct link to the english blog home page like this:
Home | Products | About | Media | Blog | Store
Of course, as the link to the english blog will be on the main menu of each language, it will create the same amount of internal links than the number of pages per language.
is it ok?
-
Hi Eduardo,
I would go with option 1. It is the structure most tend to use, although it is really about which makes more sense. Make use of the HREFLANG tag to add some clarification to these.
As per the last part of the the question, are you planning on using a language drop down at the top of the page or add a link from every post in every language back to the English blog?
-Andy
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
-
Japanese URL-structured sitemap (pages) not being indexed by Bing Webmaster Tools
Hello everyone, I am facing an issue with the sitemap submission feature in Bing Webmaster Tools for a Japanese language subdirectory domain project. Just to outline the key points: The website is based on a subdirectory URL ( example.com/ja/ ) The Japanese URLs (when pages are published in WordPress) are not being encoded. They are entered in pure Kanji. Google Webmaster Tools, for instance, has no issues reading and indexing the page's URLs in its sitemap submission area (all pages are being indexed). When it comes to Bing Webmaster Tools it's a different story, though. Basically, after the sitemap has been submitted ( example.com/ja/sitemap.xml ), it does report an error that it failed to download this part of the sitemap: "page-sitemap.xml" (basically the sitemap featuring all the sites pages). That means that no URLs have been submitted to Bing either. My apprehension is that Bing Webmaster Tools does not understand the Japanese URLs (or the Kanji for that matter). Therefore, I generally wonder what the correct way is to go on about this. When viewing the sitemap ( example.com/ja/page-sitemap.xml ) in a web browser, though, the Japanese URL's characters are already displayed as encoded. I am not sure if submitting the Kanji style URLs separately is a solution. In Bing Webmaster Tools this can only be done on the root domain level ( example.com ). However, surely there must be a way to make Bing's sitemap submission understand Japanese style sitemaps? Many thanks everyone for any advice!
Technical SEO | | Hermski0 -
Spammy Structured Data Markup Removal
Hi There, I'm in a weird situation and I am wondering if you can help me. Here we go, We had some of our developers implement structured data markup on our site, and they obviously did not know what they were doing. They messed up our results in the SERP big time and we wound up getting manually penalized for it. We removed those markups and got rid of that penalty (phew), however now we are still stuck with two issues. We had some pages that we changed their URLs, so the old URLs are now dead pages getting redirected to the newer version of the same old page, however, two things now happened: a) for some reason two of the old dead pages still come up in the Google SERP, even though it's over six weeks since we changed the URLs. We made sure that we aren't linking to the old version of the url anywhere from our site. b) those two old URLs are showing up in the SERP with the old spammy markup. We don't have anywhere to remove the markup from cause there are no such pages anymore so obviously there isn't this markup code anywhere anymore. We need a solution for getting the markup out of the SERP. We thought of one idea that might help - create new pages for those old URLs, and make sure that there is nothing spammy in there, and we should tell google not to index these pages - hopefully, that will get Google to de-index those pages. Is this a good idea, if yes, is there anything I should know about, or watch out for? Or do you have a better one for me? Thanks so much
Technical SEO | | Joseph-Green-SEO0 -
Help: Blog post translations resulting in 404 Not Found?
A client set up a website that has multilingual functionality (WPML) and the back end is a bit of a mess. The site has around 6 translated versions of the 30 or so existing English blog posts in French, Italian and Spanish - all with their own URLs. The problem is that on the remaining 24 English blog posts, the language changer in the header is still there - even though the majority of posts have not been translated - so when you go to change the language to French, it adds **?lang=fr **onto the existing english URL, and is a page not found (4xx client error). I can't redirect anything because the page does not exist. Is there a way to stop this from happening? I have noticed it's also creating italian/french/spanish translation of the english Categories too. Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | skehoe0 -
Optimizing blog domain for maximum rank/traffic potential
Hello wonderful Moz community! I need some advice. Here is the situation: I work in a small division within a much larger company. We each have our own domain, i.e. www.parent.com and www.child.com. We (the child) have a domain authority of 57, while our parent has a domain authority of 86. Our blog lives on blogs.parent.com/child. My understanding is that www.brand.com/blogs is better for SEO than blogs.brand.com (we had no control of directory structure decisions at the parent level). Given all that, in terms of maximizing traffic to our domain, would we be better off moving our blog to www.child.com/blogs? Here are a couple of potential pros/cons bouncing around in my newbie brain: a) By moving the blog to our domain, our whole site could benefit from having any external links our blog posts earn point back to our domain vs. our parent's domain. b) On the other hand, leaving the blog on our parent's domain and then linking to our content from posts over there might give our content a boost. (Of course, that theory is shot down if Google recognizes our parent/child relationship and doesn't reward our site with the benefit of linkbacks coming from our parent domain.) What say you? Are there other angles to this I’m not even considering? If you think the right decision is to move the blog over to our site, any suggestions on how not to screw that up? (301’s, etc.) Thanks in advance for your thoughts! -John
Technical SEO | | jomosi0 -
.com & .ie website how to avoid duplicate blog content?
We have 2 websites .com & .ie (both are more or less identical except 2 different markets). How can I avoid duplicate blog content as lots of our .com/blog and .ie/blog is the same? Maybe.... Our main .com blog articles are searchable then on our .ie blog content non searchable? (This way both markets get to view the content but only Google actually searches our .com blog) Alliteratively I would need to rewrite each article so that is unique Advise would be appreciated, thank you.
Technical SEO | | AdvanceSystems0 -
URL Structure for "Find A Professional" Page
I've read all the URL structure posts out there, but I'm really undecided and would love a second opinion. Currently, this is how the developer has our professionals directory working: 1. You search by inputting your Zip Code and selecting a category (such as Pool Companies) and we return all professionals within a X-mile radius of that ZIP. This is how the URL's are structured... 1. Main Page: /our-professionals 2. The URL looks like this after a search for "Deck Builders" in ZIP 19033: /our-professionals?zipcode=19033&HidSuppliers=&HiddenSpaces=&HidServices=&HidServices_all=[16]%2C&HidMetroareas=&srchbox= 3. When I click one of the businesses, URL looks like this: viewprofile.php?id=409 I know how to go about doing this, but I'm undecided on the best structure for the URL's. Maybe for results pages do this: find-professionals/deck-builders/philadelphia-pa-19033 And for individual pro's profiles do this: /deck-builders/philadelphia-pa-19033/Billys-Deck-Service Any input on how to best structure this so that we can have a good chance of showing in SERPs for "Deck Builders near New Jersey" and the such, would be much appreciated.
Technical SEO | | zDucketz0 -
Toggle Menu's and Collapsible Nav Structure Good For SEO?
Does anyone have any insights on toggle menu's or collapsible navigation structure and if its good/bad for Search?
Technical SEO | | Your_Workshop0 -
Duplicate Title Tags On Blogs
Hello Mozzers, I have a client who has a blog and articles section on their website, due to the amount of content they have in these section they have multiples pages so it would be like.. www.bluewidgets.com/blog/p1 www.bluewidgets.com/blog/p2 www.bluewidgets.com/blog/p3 www.bluewidgets.com/blog/p4 All obvioulsy with seperate content in each blog/article posts but the meta descriptions on title tags for this p1,p2,p3,p4 and so on are all the same, is this a major issue? and if so how do I fix it?
Technical SEO | | Prestige-SEO0