Let's say I have a website that has 2 languages, one uses Latin and the second one Cyrillic transcriptions in URLs.
For example:
example.com/link
example.com/ссылка
My question is which is more user and SEO friendly, if I leave them as is or if I add the language prefix, so they'd become
example.com/en/link
example.com/ru/ссылка
I understand that such subdirectories should be used if I have languages that are similar and then the user wouldn't be confused, but does that also apply in my case?
It's better to use the second one for better SEO results.
example.com/en/link
example.com/ru/ссылка
Google likes the tree-like structure. Of course you can use the main language without prefix.
Also it's better to have all languages in one domain:
domain.com/en
domain.com/ru
not on subdomains like this
en.domain.com
ru.domain.com
Wish you luck.
Related
What is considered the best strategy for URLs of translated websites? Something I see happen frequently is:
http://example.com/english-slug.html
http://example.com/de/english-slug.html
http://example.com/fr/english-slug.html
This has the (minor) advantage that a user can manually switch to another language by modifying the URL. The disadvantage seems to be that the URL consists of a slug in the wrong language for every page not in the default language. That would cause a SEO penalty, I think.
The alternative would be to translate the slugs as well and optionally omit the language identifier as well:
http://example.com/english-slug.html
http://example.com/deutscher-slug.html
http://example.com/slug-francois.html
Some languages do not really lend themselves to be 'sluggified', such as Russian, Chinese and Arab. You'll end up with transliterations that make little sense.
I think you should use language tags and translated slugs:
http://example.com/en/hello-world
http://example.com/de/hallo-welt
Why language tags? To avoid collisions.
Sometimes you might want to have the same slug for different languages (for example, "team" in English as well as in German).
Why translated paths? For better usability.
Not all users understand the "default" language, and depending on its script, they might not even be able to type/remember/dictate the slug. (It doesn’t make sense in the first place to use human-readable slugs that only part of your users are able to understand.)
Yes, it would be a "(minor) advantage that a user can manually switch to another language by modifying the URL". But it’s unlikely that users or search engines would expect this to work (see my related answer on Webmasters). So you would gain little (URL hacking for advanced users) and lose much (bad usability for users using the non-default language).
That said, it would still be possible to enable this URL hacking feature in most cases: When users change the language tag de (in /de/hallo-welt) to en (/en/hallo-welt), you could check if it exists (if yes, show it), and if not, check if there exists a slug "hallo-welt" in any language, find its English translation and redirect to it (from /en/hallo-welt to /en/hello-world).
Another way is setting the language as a query string parameter, such as:
http://example.com/hello-world?hl=en
http://example.com/hallo-welt?hl=de
for example Google Flights web site uses this method.
The best solution, if you can afford it, is to send the document with the right name, that means, using the right word on each language.
Of course each document should be sent with the respective language setting on the headers.
For storing them, you can use folders and let the web server choose the right document according to the language preference; or you can use server side technology, like PHP, perl, etc to send the document and adjust the URL.
In any case, you have to have a default language to be sent when you don't have the requested language.
If you can't or don't want to send document with the right name, using subdomains is the best next option. This option, is not as common as adding the language after the domain, and that means, that people may not be used to it, although, it has some advantages, for instance;
Each language behaves like a whole new URL/site (almost).
People feel like visiting a dedicated site, not a subsection where the second language is relegated and may fail at any moment (some content may not be translated).
Some people are not familiar with their two letter representation of language, but everybody knows how his language is called and spelled.
It generates cleaner URL's.
It is believed that having subdomains increases appearance on SERPs (I don't have knowledge of this and it may have changed).
It's easier to have different layouts if you want to.
It's easier to set different servers according to language.
Of course subdomains have some disadvantages, like:
A bit more work to set properly from the server perspective.
Less collaboration from the part towards high ranking.
Some people may not expect it but expect a subfolder.
Next would be the subfolder option, as you show on the question. This is the recommended way if your main perspective is SEO since all the relevance of the domain stays on that same domain and each language helps to a common "pot" of ranking.
My perspective when choosing a solution, is never SEO, under any circumstance. Whatever ranking I get is due to the content itself and the best use I can give to technology. But I understand that my point ov view is not the most common.
One thing to consider also, is that you should provide some kind of explanation or help the user so he can take actions to change to the preferred language. It may be using icons, a tooltip, or any other method that works for your design and verbosity.
One thing to avoid, and you didn't ask for it, but is related; is using language autodetection. Lots of times, the user is in a different country or using a version of a browser that has a different language from what he can understand and the autodetction just makes a big mess. Offer the default version and a clear way to change it.
I have a restaurants directory Rails app in which I need to categorize the content (restaurant description pages) by cities. The cities are stored in the database. The questions that I have:
What is the Rails way of doing this? Is it best to add a scope in routes as for ex. the language locale? For ex.: example.com/en/new-york/restaurants...
Is it better to translate, transliterate or leave the city names as-is provided that the content is targeted for the locals. For ex.: example.com/moscow vs example.com/moskva vs example.com/москва in terms of "Rails-wayness" and SEO friendliness?
In terms of SEO, is it better to use subdomains (new-york.example.com) or subdirectories (example.com/new-york).
I would appreciate if you could share your experience about this matter!
You probably don't want the locale/language to be embedded in the URL.
For SEO purposes you probably want to pick one version and go with it all the time. That way you're aggregating all of your "link juice" to one URL. Some search engines will penalize you for having the same content at multiple URLs.
This is a good question, and I'm not entirely sure. I'd be kind of surprised if either one makes a huge difference. (It wouldn't be the first time I've been surprised...)
What is the optimal SEO strategy for storing a blog?
1) In a directory: www.example.com/blog
2) In a separate domain: www.exampleblog.com
3) In a sub-domain: www.blog.example.com
With a directory, the repetitions earned by the blog are directly transferred to the main domain (www.example.com). With a separate domain, any links to my site would count as backlinks.
I'm leaning towards option 1. What other pros and cons should I consider?
This is comprehensive, Sub-domain versus sub-directory (via Webmasters SE). It was updated in November 2012. Look at this answer too, as it specifically describes, with a huge chart, what effect sub-folders (meaning sub-directory in this context) versus sub-domains have on SEO, and how use of reverse proxy can affect blog SEO. The gist of it is that a sub-domain is preferable to a sub-directory.
EDIT
I may have mis-read the question. If the choice is between
mywebsitename.com/blog
versus
mywebsitenameblog.com
then I would definitely recommend using the sub-directory. This is why:
If you use an entirely different domain name, even if it is your website's domain with the four letters blog concatenated, it will be confusing to users, as no one does that!
You will need to pay for a second domain and that costs more money.
You'll be doing something that is inconsistent with typical website naming conventions, which I'd avoid if I were concerned about SEO and were developing an e-commerce website. I don't know if it will negatively affect SEO ranking, but it won't help, as it will be an entirely different domain name, without any of the positive reputation or credibility of your primary domain name.
It will be four characters longer, which is never good, as it will be less convenient, more difficult to remember, etc.
Better yet, use a sub-domain of your primary website for your blog. To summarize, you should do the following, in order of best to worst:
blog.mywebsitename.com
mywebsitename.com/blog
mywebsitenameblog.com
There is slight difference depending on which search engine is going to look at and add or subtract value to your blog on basis of this decision.
Read this blog post from Matt Cutts. or Watch this video for summary
If you go for another domain then search engine expect it to be separate content and not much relation in terms of your main domain rank.
I would install the blog in sub-directory called blog and stop worrying about actual juice from search engines as it may vary from one to another.
I'm a beginner regarding SEO, so I'm basically trying to create SEO friendly URLs via mod-rewrite for example:
www.website.com?title=The-Big-Book
to
www.website.com/The-Big-Book
The question I have at the moment is how should I approach this if there is a chance the title (user defined) will be in a foreign language such as Chinese?
RewriteRule ^/?([^/.]+)$ **YOUR REWRITE RULES**
i would say just pick a good format for your url, (your example is not a good example of a good format), browsers support foreign languages so you dont have to worry about that.
Standard SEO caveat: It's a black box, and the algorithms are proprietary, and trying to predict and game the search engines is a crappy way to make a living.
That said, what are the baseline steps you want to take to make sure your content is visible to the major search engines (Google, Bing, etc.)
I'm specifically curious as to what role your URI Information Architecture plays. It's common wisdom that you want keywords in your URI, and you want to avoid the query-string laden approach, but what else beyond that?
A quick example of what I'm talking about. Based on something I read on a forum, I recently exposed a /category/* hierarchy on my site. In the following weeks I noticed a sharp uptick in my page views.
I'm curious what other basic steps a site/weblog should take with its URIs to ensure a baseline visibility.
A few URI tips that have kept me ranking:
Write URIs in English but include a unique ID. SO does this well: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1278157/seo-and-uri-structure
Stay consistent when linking to a page: domain.com/, domain.com/index and domain.com/index.php are different URIs
Use .html extensions, or purely /one/two/ directories for pages
There's probably hundreds of other tips! The structure of linking plays a very important role too...
Logically break your site down into many categories/subcategories
Link all pages back to your homepage
Don't link to hundreds of pages from your homepage
EDIT: Oh I forgot a very important one - a proper 404 response!
Hopefully that helps a bit
some simple things ...
meaningful and accurate meta fields (especially description, keywords)
a valid hn hierarchy on every page (e.g. h1 h2 h3 h2 h2 h3 h3 h4 h3 h2)
all (text) content accessible to a text browser
check spellings
keep content and display functionality separated (e.g. use HTML and CSS fully)
validate CSS and (X)HTML and use standard DOCTYPES
relevant <title> for each page
sensible site hierarchy and no orphan pages
1) Don't use www subdomain if you do not have to. If you or your company has made the mistake of using subdomains for asset management then you likely forced into using www just to be safe.
2) The biggest problem faced by search engines is redundant URIs for the same page. This problem is solved by using a canonical link tag in your HTML. This will perhaps help you more than any other single SEO factor.
3) Make your URIs meaningful. If people can remember URIs well enough to type them out your SEO will be significantly improved.
The most important factors with URIs is easy to remember and the ability to specify uniqueness to the search engine. Nothing else matters with regard to URIs and SEO.