SEO For Multilingual Website

Hello friends,
Please suggest… I am doing SEO for German website and now client has translated the site into the German language.
My queries:

  1. When any user search for the keyword in google.de, and comes to my website then what should be the default language of the site when page is opened?
  2. What should be the url structure of the website for language, if already we have kept sub domain as de.example.com. What url should I use for the language.
    Thanks

Admin: According to me I have started the thread in the right category. But If you feel it is not correct category please move this thread to the right category.

Unless I am missing something, you would probably be best off setting the default language to German for users who find the site through google.de.

When developing a url structure for the German translated site, you will want to use german keywords for the tail-end of the urls. Afterall, the SEO benefit of a German translation is ranking for German keywords.

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The default should be whichever page Google shows the searcher.

In general, if the visitor searches for a German word or phrase, Google is likely to show German pages in the search results. If your site is present in the results, then it will be a German page from your site that appears. And it will be that page that the user lands on when he clicks through.

Similarly if he searches for an English word or phrase, he is likely to land on an English page.

This has got nothing to do with whether he is searching from Google.de or any other Google site. At the point of doing the search, Google will try to detect the user’s language, and serve the results accordingly. (It’s true that Google.de will favour sites targeted at people in Germany, but that’s a separate issue.)

So, the answer to your question is: don’t do anything special. Just let the searcher find the page he wants.

Of course, you do need to think about what language(s) your home page should be in. But that’s got nothing to do with the page the visitor sees when they do a search.

Mike[/FONT]

Hi Mike,

Thanks for the suggestion. In end you have mention that “But that’s got nothing to do with the page the visitor sees when they do a search.” but don’t you think that a user searching from Germany will want the site content in German?

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don’t you think that a user searching from Germany will want the site content in German?

That’s exactly the point I was making.

What I said was that the language of the home page has got nothing to do with the page the visitor sees when they do a search. What’s important is the language of the page that matches the user’s search terms.

Mike[/FONT]

Not always!
I’m a Brit living in Germany and it drives me mad when (for example) Google sniffs my IP and forces me to google.de

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That’s right. But even when you go to Google.de, if you type your query in English, chances are most or all of the results will be in English.

That’s the point I was trying to make. If your site has got some pages in English and some in German, you can assume Google will direct the searcher to a page that matches their language. This is true regardless of the searcher’s location or which Google site they are using. (Well, that’s not entirely true, but it is most of the time).

By the way, Pullo, what browser are you using? When I tried Google Chrome a couple of years ago, I also found Google would force me to the version of Google that matches my IP address, and there was nothing I could do about it. The problem doesn’t arise with Firefox. This is one of the reasons I abandoned Chrome.

Mike[/FONT]

Hi Mike,

If I open a new tab in Chrome (my current browser of choice), then type google.com into the address bar and press return, I am redirected to google.de in German.
If I type in a random query in English, e.g. “football club”, I see a mix of German and English results (including some news results from a paper close to where I come from in England - scary!)
I also have the option of selecting “Google.com” at the bottom of the page. If I click this link, I am redirected to google.com and all of the results for the same query are in English.

I tried the same thing in Firefox and I am also redirected to google.de.
Shame. that would have been a reason to go back to using Firefox.

In fact, I just checked. I get redirected in every browser - Opera, IE, FF, Safari and Chrome.

FWIW, Google isn’t the worst offender as even google.de offers results based on the language of your query (your original point, I believe).
There are other sites which “helpfully” direct you to the pure German version of their site, leaving you to hunt for an option to switch to English.

[FONT=verdana]Pullo,

What you described pretty well matches my own experience of Chrome.

But in Firefox, I found that, if I went to Google.com, and if it then redirected me to Google.co.uk or Google.fr (depending on where I was at the time), I could click on the link to Google.com in the bottom right corner; after that, it would stay in Google.com. Sometimes it would start redirecting me again for no obvious reason, but most ot the time it behaves as expected.

It’s all very annoying. Surely, the whole point of typing a URL in the address bar of your browser is to tell it which site you want to visit - not which site someone else wants to you to go to.

Mike[/FONT]

Yeah, to be fair, Chrome remembers the fact that you have changed to google.com, too.
However, I clear my cookies etc on quite a regular basis, so this setting also gets wiped.

I’m not sure if this is a marketing thing, or if these companies genuinely think they’re being helpful. Either way, they’re not.
But, I’m afraid that I’m getting used to having things “dumbed down” for the benefit of your “average” non-tech-savy user (e.g. my mum).
A further example of this would be the trend towards hiding any kind configuration options in browsers nowadays.

Oh well, c’est la vie.

I understand the feeling so well…

Sometimes I want to search using Google.es (my country’s) but some other times I’d rather use Google.com or Google.co.uk

It depends on what I’m looking for and the reason I’m searching for it.

As an example, I used to live in UK and I have my sister living there… so sometimes I want to search for places and/or things from local shops in UK before I do my trip… or to ask my sister to buy the for me if I’m not going… then, I’d rathe use Google.co.uk because the number of results will include more local shops than if I use .com and obviously .es

edit: this was kind of off-topic, at the end of the day, I simply wanted to agree with @James_Hibbard;

To continue the moan …

I have a couple of clients in the UK.
If I want to check how they are ranking on google.co.uk, then google.de is useless to me.
Aaargghh!!

Edit: @molona ; - you’re right, this is sliding into a bit of a rant. I’ll shut up now :slight_smile:

Have the URLs and Title of the page in the regional language with the most searched and relevant keywords in that regional. Its better to host the site on the regional server even though it is hosted under a same domain on a sub-domain or a sub-folder and use a CDN to save time for the images and videos to load. Get regional or local authoritative and relevant links for your site to rank well in local search engines.