Same URL For different Countries?

Can We use Different language content on single url?

[Evercome Shathees]

I do SEO for an Ecommerce website Which serves deals in India and Thai. So I am planning to display deals on single web url for India and thailand. For ex: Site display deals for hotel deals for india and thai, content will be in English and Thai respectively. But URL will be the same for both pages. SO, If we do seo in indian & thai sites, Is searchengine will consider as duplicate url?

[RhinoFish]

yes, will be duplicate.

learn more here:
1) [googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com...]
2) [googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com...]
3) [googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com...]

[enigma1]

Depends how you setup your store and how the spiders can switch languages (if you want that). If you expose the same link regardless of language and the multi-lingual content changes based on a cookie, spiders will always see the content of the primary language. Visitors however will be able to select the language in which case the content will change along with the language cookie. And one link is enough.

Now if you need to expose the content in both languages to everyone including spiders you will need different links. Using subdomains or country domains, or some language parameter that could look like a folder etc.

As a side note it will be very useful if SEs had a documented language cookie each spider could process, will simplify lots of things.

[Evercome Shathees]

Hi Rhinofish,

I have learnt following things from Google blogspot. Hope I am Correct

1. We can use same url for showing different language content. There is no duplicate content or URL issues.
2. Using Google Translation page option will not be indexed on search engines
3.We need to use canonical tag only when we use different url for display the same content(for ex: yoursitename/en and en dot yoursitename.
4.Webmasters should use UTF-8 encoding, if they go for non-english language
5.So, When we go for multi-lingual Optimization optimize site url according to your specific country. For Ex: Thai sites, use following URL formates
yoursitename dotcom/th (or) th dot yoursitename

[RhinoFish]

1. We can use same url for showing different language content. There is no duplicate content or URL issues.

You got most things right, imo.
But not this one.
And it's the big one.
Please read them again, especially the first one i linked, looking for examples like this:

http://example.ca/en/mountain-bikes.html
http://example.ca/fr/mountain-bikes.html

[mattia]

Yes, you should definitely use different language in the URLs.
Our store is in english and in french and we have both french and english URLs.
I am not sure that all ecommerce platform will let you be multi-language at the URL level but the solution we use let us do it.
The solution we have also let us include the name of category on the URL, along with the product name so a product page URL will look like:

http://www.domain.com/category_name/product_name.html

make sure to have in each bottom page a link to the other language equivalent page.

best,
Marc

[edited by: lorax at 5:19 pm (utc) on Jan 16, 2012]

[enigma1]

Our store is in english and in french and we have both french and english URLs, check it out

You better fix your code because your site requires cookies to switch languages. Search engines won't process cookies

[mattia]

@enigma1
Thank you for your reply.
If you would like to switch language you do not really need cookies.
You might if you use the language switch located on top, however you will not need cookies if you use the bottom link that says (home version francaise) or (home english version).
This link is especially there for search engines to easily switch from only language to the other one.

anyway, I wanted to thank you for providing a comment and checking the site.