In my application I have localized urls that look something like this:
http://examle.com/en/animals/elephant
http://examle.com/nl/dieren/olifant
http://examle.com/de/tiere/elefant
This question is mainly for Facebook Likes, but I guess I will hit similar problems when I start thinking about search engine crawlers.
What kind of url would you expect as canonical url? I don't want to use the exact english url, because I want that people clicking the link will be forwarded to their own language (browser setting/dependent on IP).
The IP lookup is not something that I want to do on every page hit. Besides that I would need to incorporate more 'state' in my application, because I have to check wether a user has already been forwarded to his own locale, or is browsing the english version on purpose.
I guess it will going to be something like:
http://example.com/something/animals/elephant
or maybe without any language identifier at all:
http://example.com/animals/elephant
but that is a bit harder to implement, bigger chance on url clashes in the future (in the rare case I would get a category called en or de).
Summary
What kind of url would you expect as canonical url? Is there already a standard set for this?
I know this question is a bit old, but I was facing the same issue.
I found this:
Different language versions of a single page are considered duplicates only if the main content is in the same language (that is, if only the header, footer, and other non-critical text is translated, but the body remains the same, then the pages are considered to be duplicates).
That can be found here: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/crawling/consolidate-duplicate-urls
From this I can conclude that we should add locales to canonicals.
I did find one resource that recommends not using the canonical tag with localized addresses. However, Google's documentation does not specify and only mentions subdomains in another context.
There is more that that language that you need to think of.
It's typical a tuple of 3 {region, language, property}
If you only have one website then you have {region, language} only.
Every piece of content can either be different in this 3 dimensional space, or at least presented differently. But this is the same piece of content so you'd like to centralize managing of editorial signals, promotions, tracking etc etc. Think about search systems - you'd like page rank to be merged across all instances of the article, not spread thinly out.
I think there is a standard solution: Canonical URL
Put language/region into the domain name
example.com
uk.example.com
fr.example.com
Now you have a choice how you attach a cookie for subdomain (for language/region) or for domain (for user tracking)!
On every html page add a link to canonical URL
<link rel="canonical" href="http://example.com/awesome-article.html" />
Now you are done.
There certainly is no "Standard" beyond it has to be an URL. What you certainly do see on many comercial websites is exactly what you describe:
<protocol>://<server>/<language>/<more-path>
For the "language-tag" you may follow RFCs as well. I guess your 2-letter-abbrev is quite fine.
I only disagree on the <more-path> of the URL. If I understand you right you are thinking about transforming each page into a local-language URL? I would not do that. Maybe I am not the standard user, but I personally like to manually monkey around in URLs, i.e. if the URL shown is http://examle.com/de/tiere/elefant, but I don't trust the content to be translated well I would manually try http://examle.com/en/tiere/elefant -- and that would not bring me to the expected page. And since I also dislike those URLs http://ex.com/with-the-whole-title-in-the-url-so-the-page-will-be-keyworded-by-search-engines my favorite would be to just exchange the <language> part and use generic english (or any other language) for <more-path>. Eg:
http://examle.com/en/animals/elephant
http://examle.com/nl/animals/elephant
http://examle.com/de/animals/elephant
If your site is something like Wikipedia, then I would agree to your scheme of translating the <more-part> as well.
Maybe this Google's guidelines can help with your issue: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en
It says that many websites serve users (across the world) with content targeted to users in a certain region. It is advised to use the rel="alternate" hreflang="x" attributes to serve the correct language or regional URL in Search results.
Related
I have a product page with options in select list (ex : color of the product etc...).
You accede to my product with different urls :
www.mysite.com/product_1.html
www.mysite.com/product_1.html#/color-green
If you accede with the url www.mysite.com/product_1.html#/color-green, the option green of the select list is automatically selected (with javascript).
If i link my product page with those urls, is there a risk of duplicate content ? Is it good for my seo ?
thx
You need to use canonical urls in order to let the search engines know that you are aware that the content seems duplicated.
Basically using a canonical url on your page www.mysite.com/product_1.html#/color-green to go to www.mysite.com/product_1.html tells the search engine that whenever they see www.mysite.com/product_1.html#/color-green they should not scan this page but rather scan the page www.mysite.com/product_1.html
This is the suggested method to overcome duplicate content of this type.
See these pages:
SEO advice: url canonicalization
A rel=canonical corner case
At one time I saw Google indexing the odd #ed URL and showing them in results, but it didn't last long. I think it also required that there was an on page link to the anchor.
Google does support the concept of the hashbang (#!) as a specific way to do indexable anchors and support AJAX, which implies an anchor without the bang (!) will no longer be considered for indexing.
Either way, Google is not stupid. The the basic use of the anchor is to move to a place on a page, i.e. it is the same page (duplicate content) but a different spot. So Google will expect a #ed URL to contain the same content. Why would they punish you for doing what the # is for?
And what is "the risk of duplicate content". Generally, the only onsite risk from duplicate content is Google may waste it's time crawling duplicate pages instead of focusing on other valuable pages. As Google will assume # is the same page it is more likely to not event try the #ed URL.
If you're worried, implement the canonical tag, but do it right. I've seen more issues from implementing it badly than the supposed issues they are there to solve.
Both answers above are correct. Google has said they ignore hashtags unless you use hash-bang format (#!) -- and that really only addresses a certain use case, so don't add it just because you think it will help.
Using the canonical link tag is the right thing to do.
One additional point about dupe content: it's less about the risk than about a missed opportunity. In cases where there are dupes, Google chooses one. If 10 sites link to your site using www.example.com and 10 more link using just example.com you'll get the :link goodness" benefit of only 10 links. The complete solution to this involves ensuring that when users and Google arrive at the "wrong" on, the server responds with an HTTP 301 status and redirects the user to the "right" one. This is known as domain canonicalization and is a good thing for many, many reasons. Use this in addition to the "canonical" link tag and other techniques.
I have a multilingual site with the same content in different languages with descriptive seo urls incorporating the title of each pages article. To switch between said languages of translated articles I have an action which looks up the translated title using the previous language and redirects to it. This all works fine except I noticed, despite there being no view, google has indexed said redirect urls.
Is this bad practice? I don't want to 301 redirect as it seems having links on every page to 301 redirects is a really bad idea. Do I somehow include a meta tag or is there some other approach?
The reason I currently have this is I want each article page to link to all of its translations using flags at the top of each page. The more I think about it I should just generate the direct url as this itself may have seo benefits. The reason I didn't go down this path originally was page rendering speed. I'd have to look up multiple articles solely for their url slug and expire caches of all languages upon any title change (it's a wiki style user generated content). Also, in some cases a translation wouldn't exist in which case I would need to link instead, say, to the category of article with a flash message.
So thinking through this while writing maybe this seems the preferable if more difficult to implement solution?
Hey Mark, from a search engine perspective you definitely don't want to rely on redirects everywhere, if for nothing other than performance. Search engines allocate a certain amount of bandwidth to each site based on ranking, if you're redirecting every page, you're eating up more of that bandwidth than you need to, and potentially not getting as much content crawled as you could otherwise.
Your second solution of generating the localized URLs and sticking them at the top of the page is the best option for search engines. That will give a unique URL for each page, and will provide a direct link to each page that Google and Bing (e.g. Yahoo) can follow and index.
I provided a set of best practices for SEO & Localized sites on another stackoverflow Q&A, here's a link, I think you'll find it valuable too: Internationalization and Search Engine Optimization
Good luck!
I have an app that I'm building that supports ten languages: English, simplified and traditional Chinese, French, Spanish, Russian, Japanese, German, and Hindi.
I tried a number of things but what I ended up doing was making :en default and then switching by where the request was coming from and then when uses signup they can set a default language. So if it was coming from mainland China I use :scn, and if it comes from Hong Kong I use :tcn traditional Chinese/simplified Chinese.
This way the application maintains a state of a language and there is no redirection.
I think any redirection is going to be troublesome so I wouldn't do that. Also, I am working on a dynamic site map that will list all of the links to google, which will have 10 different translations per 'page'.
I haven't deployed my application yet so I cannot check the Chinese search engines etc... to see if they are indexing my content.
I'm doing a site which supports multiple languages. At the moment, I’m doing like /en/… in the URL path and using .htaccess to determine which language the user is on. Actually, this is very common for sites with multiple languages to either do http://en.example.com or http://example.com/en/.
My question is: Why is it so common to show in the URL which language the user is viewing? I can't see any technical advantages. Is it for optimizing user experience?
Because you could easily just use sessions/cookies and hide it from the user which I'm leaning to at the moment.
Thanks in advance :)
For easy bookmarking probably.
Specifying the language information in the URL is 1 way to indicate that you want to view in that particular language, ignoring your current locale.
Wrapping this information in the URL is better than using a cookie for example, as some users may delete all cookies after each browsing session.
And because of this pseudo REST like URL, /en/, it is easily bookmarkable, and search engine friendly
I think it's used as a substitute for not owning the domain within each TLD. (ie company.co.uk and company.com).
It's also usable because of the uri's possibility to be localised: ikea.com/se/stolar could be the localised variant of ikea.com/en/chairs; usable both for the end user and SEO.
It is not directory, but mod_rewrite - such url as:
http://google.pl/en
gets rewritten server side for:
http://google.pl?lang=en
and for every language it will be more handy.
Why? Because if client saves link to our page in favorites and sends it to his friend, he can pass also the language of the page he was viewing. If the default language was for example polish, and he changed it to english, he saves friend some time to search and click specific button.
If you put it in the URL the search engines will store every page in every language. If you use cookies, they will only store one. So it's more a SEO advantage I think.
Scenario
The web server gets a request for http://domain.com/folder/page. The Accept-Language header tells us the user prefers Greek, with the language code el. That's good, since we have a Greek version of page.
Now we could do one of the following with the URL:
Return a Greek version keeping the current URL: http://domain.com/folder/page
Redirect to http://domain.com/folder/page/el
Redirect to http://domain.com/el/folder/page
Redirect to http://el.domain.com/folder/page
Redirect to http://domain.com/folder/page?hl=el
...other alternatives?
Which one is best? Pros, cons from a user perspective? developer perspective?
I would not go for option 1, if your pages are publically available, i.e. you are not required to log in to view the pages.
The reason is that a search engine will not scan the different language versions of the page.
The same reason goes agains option no 5. A search engine is less likely to identify two pages as separate pages, if the language identification goes in the query string.
Lets look at option 4, placing the language in the host name. I would use that option if the different language versions of the site contains completely different content. On a site like Wikipedia for example, the Greek version contains its own complete set of articles, and the English version contains another set of articles.
So if you don't have completely different content (which it doesn't seem like from your post), you are left with option 2 or 3. I don't know if there are any compelling arguments for one over the other, but no. 3 looks nicer in my eyes. So that is what I would use.
But just a comment for inspiration. I'm currently working on a web application that has 3 major parts, one public, and two parts for two different user types. I have chosen the following url scheme (with en referring to language of course):
http://www.example.com/en/x/y/z for the public part.
http://www.example.com/part1/en/x/y/z for the one private part
http://www.example.com/part2/en/x/y/z for the other private part.
The reason for this is that if I were to split the three parts up into separate applications, it will be a simple reconfiguration in the web server when I have the name of the part at the top of the path. E.g. if we were to use a commercial CMS system for the public part of the site
Edit:
Another argument against option no. 1 is that if you ONLY listen to accept-language, you are not giving the user a choice. The user may not know how to change the language set up in a browser, or may be using a frinds computer setup to a different language. You should at least give the user a choice (storing it in a cookie or the user's profile)
I'd choose number 3, redirect to http://example.com/el/folder/page, because:
Language selection is more important than a page selection, thus selected language should go first in a true human-readable URL.
Only one domain gets all Google's PR. That's good for SEO.
You could advert your site locally with a language code built-in. E.g. in Greece you would advert as http://example.com/el/, so every local visitor will get to a site in Greece and would avoid language-choosing frustration.
Alternatively, you can go for number 5: it is fine for Google and friends, but not as nice for a user.
Also, we should refrain to redirect a user anywhere, unless required. Thus, in my mind, a user opening http://example.com/folder/page should get not a redirect, but a page in a default language.
Number four is the best option, because it specifies the language code pretty early. If you are going to provide any redirects always be sure to use a canonical link tag.
Pick option 5, and I don't believe it is bad for SEO.
This option is good because it shows that the content for say:
http://domain.com/about/corporate/locations is the same as the content in
http://domain.com/about/corporate/locations?hl=el except that the language differs.
The hl parameter should override the Accept-language header so that the user can easily control the matter. The header would only be used when the hl parameter is missing. Granted linking is a little complicated by this, and should probably be addressed through either a cookie which would keep the redirection going to the language chosen by the hl parameter (as it may have been changed by the user from the Accept-language setting, or by having all the links on the page be processed for adding on the current hl parameter.
The SEO issues can be addressed by creating index files for everything like stackoverflow does, these could include multiple sets of indices for the different languages, hopefully encouraging showing up in results for the non-default language.
The use of 1 takes away the differentiator in the URL. The use of 2 and 3 suggest that the page is different, possibly beyond just language, like wikipedia is. And the use of 4 suggests that the server itself is separated, perhaps even geographically.
Because there is a surprisingly poor correlation of geographic location to language preferences, the issue of providing geographically close servers should be left to a proper CDN setup.
My own choice is #3: http://domain.com/el/folder/page. It seems to be the most popular out there on the web. All the other alternatives have problems:
http://domain.com/folder/page --- Bad for SEO?
http://domain.com/folder/page/el --- Doesn't work for pages with parameters. This looks weird: ...page?par1=x&par2=y/el
http://domain.com/el/folder/page --- Looks good!
http://el.domain.com/folder/page --- More work needed to deploy since it requires adding subdomains.
http://domain.com/folder/page?hl=el --- Bad for SEO?
It depends. I would choose number four personally, but many successful companies have different ways of achieving this.
Wikipedia uses subdomains for various
languages (el.wikipedia.org).
So does Yahoo (es.yahoo.com for Spanish), although it doesn't support Greek.
So does Gravatar (el.gravatar.com)
Google uses a /intl/el/ directory.
Apple uses a /gr/ directory (albeit in English and limited to an iPhone page)
It's really up to you. What do you think your customers will like the most?
None of them. A 'normal user' wouldn't understand (and so remember) any of those abbreviations.
In order of preference I'd suggest:
http://www.domain.gr/folder/page
http://www.domain.com/
http://domain.com/gr/folder/page
3 or 4.
3: Can be easily dealt with using htaccess/mod_rewrite. The only downside is that you'd have to write some method of automatically injecting the language code as the first segment of the URI.
4: Probably the best method. Using host headers, it can all be sent to the same web application/content but you can then use code to extract the language code and go from there.
Simples. ;)
I prefer 3 or 4
I'd like to start using "SEO Friendly Urls" but the notion of generating and looking up large, unique text "ids" seems to be a significant performance challenge relative to simply looking up by an integer. Now, I know this isn't as "human friendly", but if I switched from
http://mysite.com/products/details?id=1000
to
http://mysite.com/products/spacelysprokets/sproket/id
I could still use the ID alone to quickly lookup the details, but the URL itself contains keywords that will display in that detail. Is that friendly enough for Google? I hope so as it seems a much easier process than generating something at the end that is both unique and meaningful.
Thanks!
James
Be careful with allowing a page to render using the same method as Stack overflow.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/820493/random-text-can-cause-problems
Black hats can this to cause duplicate content penalty for long tail competitors (trust me).
Here are two things you can do to protect yourself from this.
HTTP 301 redirect any inbound display url that matches your ID but doesn't match the text to the correct text.
Example:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/820493/random-text-can-cause-problems
301 ->
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/820493/can-an-seo-friendly-url-contain-a-unique-id
Use canonical URLs.
<link rel="canonical"
href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/820493/can-an-seo-friendly-url-contain-a-unique-id"
/>
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/820493/can-an-seo-friendly-url-contain-a-unique-id
I'd say you're fine.
Have a look at the URLs that StackOverflow uses. They have a unique id, then they have the SEO-friendly stuff. You can omit the SEO-friendly stuff and the URL still works.
You are making a devils bargan here, you are trading away business goals for technology goals.
If you were to ask "From a purely business and SEO prospective, is it better to include unique IDs in the URL or not?"; the answer would clearly be to not use them.
The question then becomes, if you do use them, how much does it hurt you in the search engines? The answer is that it definately has some negative impact. How much is yet to be determined.
In terms of "user friendly", no, they are definitely not user friendly.
In terms of Google, they state "Whenever possible, shorten URLs by trimming unnecessary parameters." See their URL structure document.
I'm not aware of any problems caused by adding an ID to a URL. In fact it can be extremely useful, as it allows the human/search engine friendly part of the URL to be changed without causing a broken link to a page that a search engine has already indexed. Using SO as an example, here's a link to your question:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/820493/you-can-put-any-text-you-want-here
Nothing wrong with that. An increasing number of services have started to use a hybrid solution as Paul Tomblin already pointed out. In addition to SO, Tumblr uses this pattern too (maybe it was the first).
Furthermore, in certain services—like Google News—the URL must contain a unique numeric ID.
Getting rid of the parameterized URL will definitely help. From my experience, including the ID does not hurt or help, as long as there are no '?key=value' pairs in the url.
I have two seemingly contradictory points to make here:-
Nobody looks at URLs! Experience has "trained" browser users to render the "Address" box contents as invisable, they know the contents will be any two of 'ureadable', 'meaningless' and 'confusing', hence they just ignore it completely.
Using a String which can be easily converted to an integer may offer a slight performance advantage over using a longer string which is slightly harder (hash() vs. to_int() ) to convert into an integer. However in the context of the average web application any performance difference would would be negligable.
My advice would be to stick with what your comfortable with.
Use something like modrewrite to parse URLs before they reach your server. So you could convert a slug like http://oorl.com/99942/My-Friendly-Text-For-Search-Engines/ into http://oorl.com/lookup.php?id=99942. This will also let you change slug and keywords used to optimize certain links without damaging functionality.
Duplicate refer cause more negative impact compare to friendly URL, be careful about using fake text with id, your competitors could miss use this.
Yes, and in fact it's more SEO friendly to include a number in your url as it implies to google that you are consistently updating your content.
I am fairly sure that it makes it much more difficult to get indexed in Google News if you don't have an incrementing number attached in some way to your URLs.