Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I would like some opinions on my following concern…
I have a site which is targeting people from Europe. The Uk market is a first priority but also other European countries like Germany, Italy etc…
The site has a .com domain and is hosted on US servers…
I have decided to migrate to UK based servers in order to help with SE rankings in the UK (IS IT A GOOD IDEA?) but keep the domain as .com so it doesn’t look as a UK specific site to let’s say visitors from Germany…
How shall I go about translating the site? I have seen some geo-location scripts that automatically detect country of visitor and display the appropriate language. Do you think this could be bad in terms of SEO?
And my biggest concern: If I translate the site in different languages will for eg Google UK stop favoring me (if he ever stars :-) because this will suggest to Google that the site is not intended for the UK market
Thanks for sharing your opinions and sorry for the long post.
Filip
Ps. I already have a .co.uk extension but I am not sure if (and in what way) to use it…
[edited by: tedster at 8:27 pm (utc) on Mar. 17, 2009]
You've asked a number of questions, so I'll take up just one - how to go about serving the translations. I'd say it's best not to try to "guess" what any particular user needs, whether by their IP location or their browser language or anything else.
Instead, have a unique url for each language you server, and then keep it simple -- serve the exact url that is requested. You can use either a hostname (subdomain) or a subdirectory to group pages by language. What you don't want is the same url returning a different language to different users. One of many SEO pitfalls here - googlebot will always use a US IP, so you may be hiding the German content from Google completely unless you give it it's own set of addresses.
Do you think that by having multiple languages google UK will see the site as not really intended for the uk market and affect its rankings?
You can also give some other signals:
1. the lang attribute for the <html> element: <html lang="en-uk">
2. the meta content-language element <meta http-equiv="content-language" content="en-uk">
3. the server header: Content-Language: en-uk
