This question may be impractical and may be stupid, so please pardon me.
I want to change the LANGUAGE OF URL.
For example,
If the URL is
www.google.com
I just want to translate it to another Language(HERE 'MALAYALAM- An Southern Indian Language'). In Malayalam "Google" looks like "ഗൂഗിള്" . Means I just want to display in my address bar as www.ഗൂഗിള്.com instead of www.google.com.
Simply, how can I create default english URL to alternate language URL. PHP, Javascript, Jquery are preferred.
There is no technical solution to this. The only way to do it is to purchase the actual domain ഗൂഗിള്.com and to host a web site under it.
That domain name, however, is already taken and points to a Google search form.
See Wikipedia on Internationalized Domain Names
Related
Is it possible to create a new page using german special character in a url path (e.g example.com/prüfung.html).
The ü character can't pass validation, and if i try to change the validation rules so it can pass the validation, the page can't be accessed neither via backend nor frontend.
is it possible to do that?
I think currently we do not allow that. I can open a feature request and have a look at it. Would you explain why you need that? I mean is it better for SEO? Because actually this URL will be impossible to enter for some people not using a German keyboard.
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.
I'm currently writing an ASP.NET MVC 3 web application that supports multiple languages.
I already managed to translate all the routes so that calls like:
www.mysite.de/Kontakt and www.mysite.de/Contact will route to the same Controller/Action.
By design it is so that when calling www.mysite.de the language (stored in the session object) will automatically be set to a default language (here German). The navigation of the site is then dynamically setup accordingly.
The language in the session object can be changed by either hitting the "English version" link or when manually calling e.g. www.mysite.de/Contact. In this case it is recognized that the link (/Contact) matches a route that is
defined as English and so I change the language in the session object to English. Of course the content of the sites is also localized.
My question now is how does that cooperate with SEO, especially with Google?
I already add the Content-Language meta tag dynamically to each page. So I think that with a proper sitemap.xml should be sufficient.
Does Google recognize this correctly? Is it when searching Google in German that I get "Kontakt" as result and "Contact" when searching in English?
Another issue is what happens when the link is the same for different languages? E.g. the link to "Jobs" would/could be the same as well in English as in German.
I hope that the question is understandable as my issue is rather complicated.
Cheers,
Simon
Google does not only rely on you telling them what language your site is in, you only hint them.
The pages will be analyzed and presented as a page in "German" or a page in "English" based on the language of the content.
But your base assumption is correct.
Yes, if I search for your page in German, and Google has indexed the page as a page in German, Google will return Kontakt.
As for your second question, unless you provide another mean to change the language other than the path (query string or language in browser setting), those links will only be in your default (German) language.
If you would like them to appear in english, use a different, additional URL: Jobs-EN that you only have in your SiteMap.xml (and route, of course).
Another issue is what happens when the link is the same for
different languages? E.g. the link to "Jobs" would/could be
the same as well in English as in German.
You might consider having the language as part of your URL, for example:
www.mysite.de/de/Kontakt
www.mysite.de/en-us/Contact
www.mysite.de/en-gb/Contact
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.
Can someone tell me how to set language of a web page on the knowledge of IP address of visitor so that he automatically gets page in his country's language. Of course if that language is implemented by web developer. Even better I sow some examples of automatic Google translation of the text.
So how to achieve that visitor from USA gets text on my page in English and visitor from France in French. All that translated by Google from some third original language.
Thanks a lot.
When it come to automatic language selection I'd go the mod_rewrite route if you're using Apache. It's easier to change in a production environment that touching application code. mod_rewrite grabs the "Accept-Language" out of the header then applies the rewrite rule.
RewriteCond %{HTTP:Accept-Language} ^fr [NC]
RewriteRule ^$ /fr/ [L,R=301]
You can stack the rewrite conditions and rules to work as a catch all language variations (fr, fr-ca, fr-fr, fr-mo, fr-ch all go to fr)
Checkout the official mod-rewrite documentation
good language example:
http://tech-blog.borychowski.com/index.php/2009/03/htaccess/redirect-according-to-browser-language-mod-rewrite-and-http_accept_language/
Once you push the user to the right general language (when none is defined in the URL) the application can set a session language, write links with the set lang. It's also good to allow people to change language on the fly since most users in bilingual locals (i.e. Quebec) work in more than one language. I've worked with French speaking programmers who prefer reading technical documents in English.
When it comes to Google translating text I'd be careful. If you're doing any e-commerce transaction your international customers (or local customers with international browser settings) may get incorrect or inaccurate product information, descriptions and "terms and conditions". If you don't save the exact Google translation text to your DB for every on the fly translation there is no way to track what the user has committed to in their language. Some non-translated legal copy may be in order.
I hope this helps.
Either:
Guess language from location (which you can get from their IP).
Look at the request header's "accept-language" value.
To see what's in your request header, have a look here: http://www.ericgiguere.com/tools/http-header-viewer.html
This is a bad idea from the offset.
Geolocating on IP address doesn't always work (and doesn't work if you use TOR)
Even if you get this right, what would you do for countries like Canada or Switzerland?
Automatic translation is ok, but it would be better to tell someone that you don't have the site in their language - they may then prefer to read it in a different language.