Thursday, August 07, 2008 at 9:50 AM
Have you ever thought of creating one or several sites in different languages? Let's say you want to start a travel site about backpacking in Europe, and you want to offer your content to English, German, and Spanish speakers. You'll want to keep in mind factors like site structure, geographic as well as language targeting, and content organization.Site structure
The first thing you'll want to consider is if it makes sense for you to buy country-specific top-level domains (TLD) for all the countries you plan to serve. So your domains might be ilovebackpacking.co.uk, ichlieberucksackreisen.de, and irdemochilero.es.es. This option is beneficial if you want to target the countries that each TLD is associated with, a method known as geo targeting. Note that this is different from language targeting, which we will get into a little more later. Let's say your German content is specifically for users from Germany and not as relevant for German-speaking users in Austria or Switzerland. In this case, you'd want to register a domain on the .de TLD. German users will identify your site as a local one they are more likely to trust. On the other hand, it can be pretty expensive to buy domains on the country-specific TLDs, and it's more of a pain to update and maintain multiple domains. So if your time and resources are limited, consider buying one non-country-specific domain, which hosts all the different versions of your website. In this case, we recommend either of these two options:
- Put the content of every language in a different subdomain. For our example, you would have en.example.com, de.example.com, and es.example.com.
- Put the content of every language in a different subdirectory. This is easier to handle when updating and maintaining your site. For our example, you would have example.com/en/, example.com/de/, and example.com/es/.
Geographic targeting vs. Language targeting
As mentioned above, if your content is especially targeted towards a particular region in the world, you can use the Set Geographic Target tool in Webmaster Tools. It allows you to set different geographic targets for different subdirectories or subdomains (e.g., /de/ for Germany).
If you want to reach all speakers of a particular language around the world, you probably don't want to limit yourself to a specific geographic location. This is known as language targeting, and in this case, you don't want to use the geographic target tool.
Content organization
The same content in different languages is not considered duplicate content. Just make sure you keep things organized. If you follow one of the site structure recommendations mentioned above, this should be pretty straightforward. Avoid mixing languages on each page, as this may confuse Googlebot as well as your users. Keep navigation and content in the same language on each page.
If you want to check how many of your pages are recognized in a certain language, you can perform a language-specific site search. For example, if you go to google.de and do a site search on google.com, choose the option below the search box to only display German results.
41 comments:
Pretty interesting post. I would also add that we can consider using language specific .COM or .NET domains instead of country-specific TLDs.
Having an apropriate CMS can help you managing different domains without any pain. The websites are hosted in the same area, but the content to be shown depends on the domain used to access the website. We cover these techniques in this article: http://www.multilanguagewebsites.com/multiple-domain-management.aspx
Although we're using a proprietary multilingual CMS, the discussed techniques can be implemented in any (multilingual aware) CMS.
Thanx for this help, I was thinking to have my website in Spanish language too and this will definitely be very useful info
This is an excellent post. I have optimized French and German versions of our site (which we registered .fr, and .de domains for) and used the localized versions of our keywords. Then focused on the analylycis to see which ones were converting the most effectively. I know a little French, but leaned a lot on our translaters for the German SEO.
It's a lot of work, but it pays off if you can get pad and natural search key terms in other languages.
OK, I've been searching around but haven't found an answer yet!... I have a company website hosted in Australia (AU IP address) and another website hosted in the UK (UK IP address). My company has an office in Sydney and an office in London we do the same work in both countries so I don't want to rewrite all the content of one website. Would it be OK to duplicate the website?
I hope that makes sense?!?!
I really don't want to be penalized for using duplicate content!
I already own a english/spanish site, but I cannot configure the geographic orientation because it's a dot-es domain...
Anyway, I'm using subfolders to manage each language and my application switch smartly between translated content.
Would it be better to have different domains? I think not because it would be more complicated to administer and configure.
Many thanks for this post.
I was these days discussing with my SEO co-worker how to optimize a site to UK and to Spain.
“The same content in different languages is not considered duplicate content.”
But how about different countries that speak the same language?
Can one just buy TLD’s for Germany, Austria and Switzerland and put up the same website (in German) on those three domains? (That way the Swiss are more likely to trust me as well) Or would that be considered as duplicate?
Following up on a comment by 'Remi van Beekum'
We're developing a site for the United Arab Emirates, and have a .ae domain name, but the languages spoken in the UAE are numerous, English, Arabic, Farsi, Hindi, French, etc, etc,
We're currently translating the site into 8 languages as this is appropriate for the market.
Now the advice given of buying a country specific domain for each language does not work in this situation, while our visitors are from all over the world, we want to be identified as being in the UAE, and specifically purchased the domain for this, it adds a level of credibility.
Are we going to be penalized in English & other language results from Google.com/.co.uk/.fr/.de etc because the site is in numerous languages, yet the site is on a .ae domain name representing United Arab Emirates who's 'official' language is Arabic?
If I put French at mysite.com/fr/, English at mysite.com/en/ what shall I put too root?
Simple page with language chooser? I Think That is not best practice.
I have two multilingual sites, one being my professional site (you should be redirected either to EN or FR depending on your language prefs), and the other being my blog Climb to the Stars, where I blog both in French and in English.
I actually gave a talk at Google last year about multilingualism online (you can watch the video online) and one of the points I insisted upon is to PLEASE not confuse country and language. Living in a multilingual country (Switzerland), I am constantly exposed to all the bad that comes with that confusion.
Online, political borders are important when laws come in (if you're selling stuff, for example). Otherwise, most of the time, the only borders we have are linguistic.
Buying a "x-country" domain for your "x-language" site kind of assumes that 1 country = 1 language.
Anyway... some food for thought. If you want more pointers, I've gathered some on my multilingual page. Comments welcome.
Is Google Bot understand redirection based on language preferences?
How Google scan my site if I include redirection on my site?
Witch language version have more weight?
"Avoid mixing languages on each page, as this may confuse Googlebot as well as your users."
What about using a language page?
Google doesn't allow webmaster to set a specific title or meta description for each language.
Actually, there is no title attribute for the TITLE tag.
But there is a title attribute for the META tag.
So, how can we solve this problem?
"Avoid mixing languages on each page, as this may confuse Googlebot as well as your users." (Nico, thanks, I'd missed that one)
I'm really disappointed to see this kind of advice handed out. Yes, it confuses Googlebot, but only because it doesn't (I guess?) take into account lang="xx" attributes. (Yeah, nobody uses them, but that's because nobody parses them.)
But users? Most people are not pure monolinguals. We need ways to make linguistic barriers online weaker, and not stronger.
I've been mixing languages on Climb to the Stars for eight years now, and it hasn't prevented my readers or my Page Rank from being happy.
I vote for Google learning that the "page" is not the smallest item on the web that is allowed to have its own language attribute, rather than asking people to conform to some kind of artificial absolute monolingualism.
How can I promote my website in Europe. I have Indian Domain and having a sub domain (uk.mysite.in) targeting UK visitors. When I add uk.mysite.in in google webmaster tools and move to Set geographic target. It shows that your domain is already associated with India. As per your post you can target different areas by a single website. could you please suggest me how can I promote my website in European countries.
I had a .dk domain hosted on a German server, and I went to top on phrases on SERPs from Google.de (from Germany), but my site wasn't found on Google.dk (from Denmark) - and thats WITH the .dk TLD.
I decided not to move the website to a danish server / IP address, but would try to correct it with GEO meta tags. It did - 2-3 weeks after implementing the GEO meta tags, I found it on Google.dk (from Denmark).
Bottom line is, that the TLD domain does not dictate the country / market it should target, but the GEO data of the IP seems to do so instead. To fix it - use GEO meta tags.
@ Manish
Geographic targeting does not work when you try to move your country specific domain (.in) out of a pre-defined geo-location (India).
What you probably should do is get a mysite.co.uk and set geo targeting at UK. Even if you host that site in India, it will show up in Google.co.uk (after a couple of months).
Another option is to get a mysite.com domain (.com is a non-region specific tld like .org, .info) With these tld's you are allowed to set separate geo targets for subdomains (uk.mysite.com).
@ Remi. Good question. I don't think Google considers the same content on different country tld's as duplicate content because the content is associated with a specific region. But there's a chance that this conflicts with other algorithms / filters, so any clarification on this subject from Google might help.
The email copy of this blog received via Feedburner has very tiny fonts - readable but only just. Please check.
How does one do for INDIA. As there are many languages spoken here. My Site is primarily in English, but my site targets different cities in INDIA. For Hyderabad - I want in Urdu & Telugu and for Chennai I want in Tamil for Bengaluru I want in Kannada. For North i want in Hindi.
Any one help me!!!
CMS (Content Management Systems)are also something to consider when looking to expand your business internationally by creating multilingual websites. This makes it easy to create and maintain a website with WYSIWYG content management. It is important to look for a CMS that provides UTF-8 coding making it easy to work with many languages. We use Bitrix Site Manager 7.0 that provides these tools. http://www.bitrixsoft.com
"As mentioned above, if your content is especially targeted towards a particular region in the world, you can use the Set Geographic Target tool in Webmaster Tools. It allows you to set different geographic targets for different subdirectories or subdomains (e.g., /de/ for Germany)."
This doesn't actually seem to be possible. Does it only apply to certain accounts?
Can anyone answer my question?... Preferably from Google :-)
"I've been searching around but haven't found an answer yet!... I have a company website hosted in Australia (AU IP address) and another website hosted in the UK (UK IP address). My company has an office in Sydney and an office in London we do the same work in both countries so I don't want to rewrite all the content of one website. Would it be OK to duplicate the website?"
This is really an excellent post. earlier, I was not sure about this issue & now got the complete idea :)
Keep up this Good Work!
i have an english website and want to translate some or all of my pages into spanish.
i do not have the bandwidth or budget to redesign the navigation bar or wrappers into another language. so, the content will be translated in spanish, but the design will remain in english.
my plan is to create an "En Espanol" button on the navigation bar which would link to a "Spanish home page" that will contain links to all my spanish pages.
what is the best approach to create these new pages? i think subdirectories, but any and all suggestions would be very helpful.
should the title, keywords and description be translated for these pages as well?
Why is there nobody from Google answering the questions asked on this topic in the comments?
There are several good, totally on-topic questions that shouldn't be to hard for the Googlers to aswer.
There is no use in having a blog to help webmasters and not help them when thay ask questions...
Can somebody from the wbmaster central team please read through the comments and give some answers?
Here, here... I second Rami
Hello,
I have exactly the same question as "Vitalized Australia":
“The same content in different languages is not considered duplicate content.”
But how about different countries that speak the same language? Can we use the same text in webpages assigned to different TLDs?
Please, an answer from Google Team will be very useful. Thanks.
I just used the brand new Moderator service to ask The Google Team for an answer...
See it there:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/08/how-to-start-multilingual-site.html
I just used the brand new "Moderator" servcie to bet the Google Team for an nswer to the opened topic
See it here:
http://moderator.appspot.com/#e%3Dagltb2RlcmF0b3JyDQsSBlNlcmllcxinKQw
== GOOGLE REPLY ==
I follow up Rami, no reply from Google, too bad.
== QUESTIONS ==
Important questions I've left:
1. (like Алексей) When you have per language sub-folders like /french/, /english/, what's best to put at the root (/)? From Google's point of view? Possible answers:
A) Auto-redirect to the language detected or most likely.
B) Show a page asking to select language.
C) Directly show a page of detected language without redirection.
D) Something else.
2. Auto-redirections detecting language from the browser are not discussed here. Meaning the same URL (ex: /watches/) would be displayed in different language (not simultaneously). Note that a user can still manually change the language when implemented on the server using sessions. Does Google like that? Is it better? Possible answers:
A) Yes better for users but not for Google indexing as the URL name can only be in one language.
B) Something else.
== CAN BE AN ANSWER ==
To answer about countries with multiple languages, I'd say that the site should be per language and not per country. A per country site of a multi-lingual country (like Hong Kong) should then allow the user to see the same content in different languages. Example: mydomain.hk/eng/ and mydomain.hk/chi/.
-- Werner
@Wernight:
many thanks for your precisions, aspecially regarding multilingual countries.
However we are still waiting for the answer of this: you mean 1 site per language, not per country... in this case how is it possible to get this unic "language oriented" site ranked in all the countries speaking this language.
Example for french: F / BE / LU / CH / CA / part of Africa
Example for german:
D / AT / CH + part of other european countries where the people have german for "native mother language" (BE + Central Europe) ?
Same question for italien, portuguese, spanish, aso..
This is a very important topic which GG doesn't seem to have properly considered !
@webmaster:
I would say you don't. One fact clearly explained is that a domain per country means that the site is specially crafted for that country and not only translated.
I'll give an example. People from country "Foo" speaking French like plenty of sexy animations and black backgrounds. People from country "Bar" speaking English and French like formal pages. If I understood your question, you'd like to index under the same URL (same PR) all content in French. As you see here the site "http://example.foo/fr/" will look different from "http://example.bar/fr/". Both would be in French language but meant for different countries.
That's how I understand this article, how I've seen websites successes, and how I'd do it.
@wernights:
thanks for your quick answering.
you said: 1 site for one country means this site is specially crafted for that country and not only translated.
Let us take an example of a company with an european brand.
This firm will first have to present a corporate site (.com) which will logically be a multilingual "generic" site if active in different countries.
But it is not enough, and this company will soon absolutelly need to have some local site (because of daily business, of different distribution network, of different marketing strategies, aso)...
Then this company will also make some national site with local extension in targeted active countries: the content of this pages have to be "specially crafted for that country" (as you wrote). But a lot of this "national" content will be considered as a duplicate content with:
A/ the corporate multilingual site (ie products, description, aso..)
B/ content of some others "national sites" speaking teh same langauhe (french: F/BE/CH/LU... german.. aso..).
What is then to be done?
It would be be very helpfull for all parts to get clearer guidelines from Google concerning this special topic
We have now purchased a .asia domain www.sbbv.asia what does this do for geographic targeting and for translations. There are so many different languages involved in asia and many countries so a website could take years to be effective to all. Google needs to clarify this issue in simple terms especially for this domain and from blogs for all others. Yes some might have stumbled across something that works but google can clarify according to its algorithms Hello google?
Adding to this blogs discuss country specific domains ie .au .fr etc but what is .asia specific to. Does anyone know where I can get the answers to this. Is it general in the way that .com or net is or does google see asia in this way as one country with many different languages. Is say europe seen the same way as asia in this respect. Thanks
Many thanks for this article.
Helped alot.
Many thanks for this article.
Helped alot.
花蓮租車
花東旅遊
花蓮旅遊
I host a blog on how to start a blog and this post has giving me some extra ideas on how to expand my blogs to another language
Thanks for the information on Geo targeting for multilingual sites, its nice to get an official answer on this topic.
Hi everyone,
Since some time has passed since we published this post, we're closing the comments to help us focus on the work ahead. If you still have a question or comment you'd like to discuss, free to visit and/or post your topic in our Webmaster Help Forum.
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