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.
Related
I currently have an English language Rails application that I am internationalizing to support Chinese(zh) translations.
The original URL structure is standard:
www.mysite.com, www.mysite.com/pages, ...
I've implemented the I18n using the standard Rails gem implementation, using the subfolder approach.
I now see the following:
Country-specific pages show as www.mysite.com/en, www.mysite.com/zh,
www.mysite.com/en/pages, www.mysite.com/zh/pages, etc.
The root URL, www.mysite.com, now displays the home page based
upon the last known language setting, i.e., if viewing Chinese
pages, going to www.mysite.com will show the www.mysite.com/zh
content (URL remains www.mysite.com). The same for English.
Will the new route, www.mysite.com/en, affect the link juice already attributed to www.mysite.com?
If yes, how do I redirect so that the English pages remain as www.mysite.com/ vs www.mysite.com/en/?
How do I ensure that going to www.mysite.com always displays the English homepage, regardless of current language selection, and www.mysite.com/zh/ is the only way to display the Chinese homepage?
note: Language selection is chosen by the user through a button in the header - no geolocation, browser language settings, etc.
Will the new route, www.mysite.com/en, affect the link juice already
attributed to www.mysite.com?
Using a consistent 301 redirect will not impact it much at all. Assuming your users come from Google, the new link will eventually replace the old link - and any minor penalties from redirects will dissolve as old backlinks fade and new ones reference the new 'main' page.
If yes, how do I redirect so that the English pages remain as
www.mysite.com/ vs www.mysite.com/en/?
You can host the english just on the root if you want. Or on /en/. But don't do both. This duplicates the content and confuses Google unless you use a rel=canonical to tell it which is the default. If you're running a multi lingual site - you want different directories for different languages. Set the language they choose via Cookie and you can redirect when the arrive to the correct page then.
How do I ensure that going to www.mysite.com always displays the
English homepage, regardless of current language selection, and
www.mysite.com/zh/ is the only way to display the Chinese homepage?
I've a better question - do you expect your users to always discover you via Google? If so, use hreflang codes either on your pages or sitemap (or both). This will ensure only the relevant language page comes up in a search from your targeted language region. You can broadly target 'en' rather than a region specific code and this will work.
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 have multilanguage website. Actually, the website language is chosen according to the web browser language.
Is there any way to set the language according to the search engine spider? For example:
Display the website in Chinese for Baidu search engine spider,
Display the website in Russian for Yandex spider?
This is called crawler identification. When a request is made to your website, User-Agent field contains the information about the browser or the crawler.
Depending on the crawler, the value of this field will be different. You can then associate different values with different languages. You can also take a look at the large list of user agents.
I'm still pretty sure that by doing this, you'll lower your rank in search engines since you provide different responses to crawlers than to real users, but I don't have solid references to support this statement.
In all cases, crawlers are expected to gather resources in different languages, and those crawlers know how to deal with multilingual websites, except maybe the ones which try to follow every worst practice. Also, the search engines you quoted are not limited to one language. Yandex is available for example in Turkish. As for Baidu, According to Wikipedia, it serves China, Japan, Thailand, Egypt and India.
I'm planning to release a community website that doesn't have a PRIMARY audience that is english speaking. This means that URLs that point to /profile /forums and so on will be in english and not in their native language. I'm not concerned if a user is using the website while accessing different URL paths in English, but I am concerned if I were to use non english URLs then would a search engine pickup on pages on the website better or worse?
Anyone care to share their opinions?
In my opinion, it would be better to have URLs that reflect the primary language of your users as it would make them finding your website easier on search engines (supposing they search using their primary language). From a SEO perspective, if possible try to also include in your URLs the relevant search terms you think would be used by your audience. If you have a forum, for example, include in the thread URLs the full thread title if possible, and so on.
Sources: my own experience with building and managing powershell.it and sqlserver.it, two of the most important Italian technology-related communities.
The best place to start on this issue would be Google's Webmaster Central section on Internationalization.
If you will have versions of the same URL in multiple languages, you can connect them using the rel="alternate"mechanism, which is explained at Google's Webmaster Tools page.
1. Summary
Using non-English URLs for non-English websites is fine.
2. Argumentation
Google Senior Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller said in a recent SEO snippets video that using non-English URLs for non-English websites is fine and that Google is able to crawl, index and rank them.
This includes non-Latin characters in your URLs. John Mueller said “as long as URLs are valid and unique, that’s fine.” He added, “So to sum it up, yes, non-English words and URLs are fine, and we recommend using them for non-English websites.”
Read full article here.
3. Disclaimer
Data of this answer were relevant in March 2018 and may be obsolete in the future.
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