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The goal is, for example, to guarantee that www.foo.com gets the PR value as www.foo.com/english or www.foo.com/spanish and so forth. Language switch can obviously be done via www.foo.com/index.php?lang=spanish, as well, I mean without going one directory down
The problem is that, it seems, once you move away from the home page, PR value decreases, so in my case www.foo.com has PR=5 and www.foo.com/english has PR=3.
I’ve already tried changing every page of the site to evenly distribute links back to the home for each language, but google hasn’t deep crawl my site yet, so I don’t know what would happen
In a nutshell, my question is whether is there a known strategy to make google think that a site has N homes, one for each language. I would prefer to stay away from dns solutions such as english.foo.com or spanish.foo.com, or do anything not kosher with redirections or cloaking or the like to avoid being penalized by google.
Any help will be appreciated
Adios
Ubaldo
Far better to determine how you want people to be able to find your website, and make sure the navigation flows naturally to the most relevant content-rich pages so that their PR is high.
my question is whether is there a known strategy to make google think that a site has N homes, one for each language.
Second, as far as PageRank is concerned the main index page for each of your separate language sub sites is treated as a unique "home" of sorts. PR is page based not site based.
Each page will have a unique PR based on the number and quality of inbound links.
Each of your separate language sub-sites should qualify for unique links from many language specific sites and directories.
The problem is that, it seems, once you move away from the home page, PR value decreases, so in my case www.foo.com has PR=5 and www.foo.com/english has PR=3.
Get more inbound links directly to your individual language indexes and you'll see their PR climb.
The index pages for all three languages have PR 6 (which really surprised me!).
Each language is treated as its own web site. Each language has its own site map (which also includes one single link to the main page of the other languages). And finally, all pages have links to all the other pages within the same language section. And on every page in the whole web site there are graphic flags with links to the main page of the other languages.
This has worked very well and all pages below the three index pages have a PR of 5.
Much of the page rank in this site comes from the internal linking structure (I think!), not so much from external links. Especially for the German and French index pages where I have very, very few incoming links.
www.foo.com has
www.foo.com/english
www.foo.com/spanish etc.
You can have a good page rank in any index page, providing you have a good linkpopularity. The easiest way is having a list on DMOZ and Yahoo.
After that, you can monitor your "competitors" in the targeted language using a linkpopularity tool: look for good site to have a link and try.
Currently, every page for a specific language (say spanish) have a link back to the language specific home www.mysite.com/spanish and so forth, although it also includes a link (behind an image logo) to www.mysite.com simply because I was scared of not having any links to the “standard” home page
Language switching is currently available only in the home page. I’ve put in my dev planning a feature to allow language switching from every page, that is, the ability to switch to another language version of the same page without going back to the home, switch languages and then retrace the steps. Presumably, this cross-pollination should benefit my google standing. No doubt that it’s beneficial to the users.
But again, my only concern is that if I take the plunge, and decide no to have (internally) links back to www.mysite.com, googlebot may thinks that the site isn’t worth a rupee, because most external links will point to www.mysite.com (I doubt that I could convince every site that links to us (including directories) to change their links from www.mysite.com to www.mysite.com/spanish and so forth). But even if I do manage to convince some, it will be very hard to guarantee an even distribution.
Ubaldo
I got the sticky message 3 times. Sounds like a bug for the [webmasterworld.com...] folks to trace in the logs.
First minor glitch that I've seen in the software which it's otherwise flawless and very feature rich.
