SEO, Multi-Regional and Multilingual Sites

[audreyzack]

Hi SEO experts,

I want my website becomes multilingual as it helps prospective customers from multi-regions to better understand the languages in their mother tongues.

There are many ways to make multilingual sites using country specific domains, subdomains or subdirectories.

Country specific domains would be more costly and requires more SEO efforts to maintain. Hence, there are two options remain subdomains or subdirectories.

Now, I'm just wondering what should be implemented in between subdomains and subdirectories? What has more worth as far as SEO is concerned.

My website is built with Magento. Will there any difference in different technology?

Looking forward to your early replies.

[goodroi]

If you can't afford country specific domains I worry that you don't have enough money to create a good designed website with valuable content and strong traffic generating links. It is not easy or cheap to build a strong website that will perform well in search results. If you are smart and creative you can do this with a smaller budget but I worry if the cost of domain registration is a concern for you. You might want to double check your strategy and your budget to make sure you have enough resources to be successful.

[audreyzack]

Hi @goodroi, Budget is not my main constraint. My point here is how to do and manage things in easy way without making more efforts. That's why I'd like to go for sub-domains or sub-directories but still having confusion on choosing. Could you please suggest me best and why I'd go for that?

[superclown2]

It's an interesting problem and I've been wondering about it myself for some time. We've become a multi-ethnic world and even though my own sites are UK focussed the clients who visit them often don't have English as their first language, and I suppose there are a lot of other countries with the same issue. Using foreign country-specific domains would be no use because they wouldn't show in UK SERPs. So, one answer would be to simply have different pages with the same text translated into different languages, possibly hosted in sub-domains, with links to them from the English language pages; the problem is that I seem to remember Mat Cutts stating some years ago that pages like this would be regarded as pure spam. I suppose one answer would be to use robots.txt to block Google from visiting these pages but even that could trigger some SEO issue. I'd appreciate any thoughts on the matter too.

[Leosghost]

the problem is that I seem to remember Mat Cutts stating some years ago that pages like this would be regarded as pure spam.

You may be remembering correctly, but I somehow don't think that Matt would say that ( even for FUD , which he only very occasionally went in for )..the reason..

If that were the case , how on earth would the U.S.A cope with so many of it's sites being in both English and Spanish ? ..
if you are not targeting different countries , but are targeting different language users within the same country then sub folders is the way to go, not sub domains..

If I search in "multi lingual" mode, the successfully positioned in SERPs sites are all using sub folder , and not sub domain, for their languages..this holds across the other ( than Google ) search engines too..

For any domain you want to get the dot com and the country tld..even if they are in the same "language space"..such as .com and .uk..But you can redirect the one to the other..( in that case redirect the dot uk to the dot com, because any "type in" that there is, is more likely to be the dot com variant )..and then sub folder each language within the target domain..use language flags as a visual clue to switch between languages..not words..and switch page to page, "red widget=> "les widgets rouge"..do not route switched languages to their "language home page"..unless the user was already on "the home page" of another language..

[audreyzack]

Hey @Leosghost, thanks for your reply. I'd like to target people with different languages for different countries. So, should I go for sub-domains strategy? After doing so, will my translated website rank for the current keywords? How much time will it take to rank? Should I block all translated sub-domain URLs on my main website using robots.txt and set that URLs for a particular country only using Google Webmaster?
Thanks for your reply in advance.

[Robert Charlton]

the problem is that I seem to remember Mat Cutts stating some years ago that pages like this would be regarded as pure spam.

The issue is the quality of the translation, and Matt was warning specifically against using machine-translated pages to target a bunch of different language markets... not the kind of thing you would be thinking about doing, I assume.

I seem to remember the "pure spam" comment too. Here's a video in which Matt covers the machine translation issue, though this isn't where he uses the "pure spam" phrase....

How should I handle localized content?
Matt Cutts - March 15, 2011
trt 2:58
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyWx31GeQWY [youtube.com]

[topr8]

@audreyzack

>>So, should I go for sub-domains strategy?

my reading of Leosghost was to go for subfolders NOT subdomains.

personally i think Robert Charlton makes a lot of sense too ... the quality of the language in the translated pages is a very important factor

[Leosghost]

@topr8..Your reading was correct :)
Use subfolders not subdomains..
Also bear in mind ..if you use subfolders then a normal SSL cert ( "green padlock" or not, depending on your choice ) on the domain covers the subfolders ..they'll all show as https..
But if you use subdomains you'll normally need to buy a "wildcard" SSL cert ( these are more expensive ) to cover the subdomains..
Usually when choosing a non wildcard SSL..you have to choose between
example.com
or www.example.com
because the latter is a subdomain of the former..
Yes the quality of the translations is extremely important..no "autotrans"..and get any human translations checked independently by at least one other person who is fluent in the languages ..I have seen some "horrors" even from official court approved translators..

[aakk9999]

I oversee a number of multilingual domains and I also go for subfolders and not subdomains, for the same reason that Leosghost said above. I would also suggest that the domain is gTLD so that each subfolder can be geo-targetted, should there a need be.

And Robert is right - a well translated and maintained page is never a spam nor is a duplicate content.