Change the website default language

will it cause bad effect?

[itravelvietnam]

Dear all,

We have a multi-lingual travel website, English and Vietnamese, and currently its default language is English, and its ranking is now high for those Primary English Keywords. However, we now intend to change the default language - English to local language (Vietnamese) to target the local customers.

It means that the homepage will be Vietnamese, and then Google will see it as brand new website, so at that time our problem is:

Will Google ban or decrease our future ranking?

What is the best solution for this problem.

Thank you in advance and awaiting your reply.

Regards,

Kurt

[coopster]

Much of this depends on your current site structure and whether or not Google has indexed the Vietnamese pages on the site. Personally, I would consider Content Negotiation [httpd.apache.org] and possibly even add an IP-to-country tactic.

[WebWalla]

Why don't you do some basic geo-targetting (as coopster also suggests) and send the Vietnam-based visitors to a new section of the site (subdomain or subdirectory) based on their IP.

There is a well-known free GEOIP database out there and you could do the geo-redirect very easily with a few lines of PHP.

Then the English version wouldn't be affected at all and you would keep your rankings.

[edited by: WebWalla at 5:07 pm (utc) on Mar. 21, 2007]

[itravelvietnam]

Thank you guys,

We will set the default language is Vietnamese and the English page
will be: English.mypage.com (One more click from the homepage)

And of course the title will be in Vietnamese: "blah blah" VS the old
title: Vietnam travel...blah blah. We understand that we may lose the
ranking, but we accept that, and our question is "Will we get banned
for this" and what are the possible affects?

Note that Changing default language is a must to us now.

Rgrds,

Kurt

[coopster]

Banned? For what? Changing your content pages? No, you won't be banned. You'll be gone from the index for a period of time though.

We understand that we may lose the ranking

No may about it, kiss it goodbye. Without any type of redirection you are forfeiting your work and your index position until the site is re-indexed with the new content. Yes, new content. The old pages are going to change entirely so the search engines are going to recognize that as new/different content and the indexing process starts all over again.

[itravelvietnam]

Thank you so much Coopster, it is so valuable.

Of course, we will redirect all the old page from ect.com to the new url: English.ect.com, and we do hope that we could still keep some rankings.

However, one more question: will the new page - English.ect.com/hotel would have the same ranking with the old one: www.ect.com/hotel when we redirect?

Regards,

Kurt

[WebWalla]

If you do it using a 301 redirect, that's the theory.

But how many times have you seen people complaining here that the SE's don't follow their 301's correctly?

I hope you realise by now that you're taking a HUGE risk and at the minimum will lose ALL your rankings until Google and the other SE's correctly follow your 301's (if they ever do).

[Robert Charlton]

itravelvietnam - Yes, by changing the .com from English to Vietnamese, you're throwing away your English language rankings.

It's also very likely that your current backlinks, which I assume are in English, are not going to be especially helpful for you to achieve rankings in Vietnamese.

Since this change is to target local customers, why aren't you simply leaving the .com version in English and building a second site in Vietnamese with a .vn tld?

Best situation for targeting both languages would be to have the .com domain as it is, with as many relevant English language links from US-hosted sites as possible... and then have the .vn site hosted in or near Vietnam, with as many relevant Vietnamese language links from Vietnamese-hosted sites as possible.