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Website Multilingual SEO: Multi Language on Single Domain

Ekon

6:47 pm on Mar 14, 2014 (gmt 0)

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I was reading on the below link about multilingual website and I had a question hope someone will be able to guide me in the right direction:
[googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk...]

For example someone from France is based in London and visits the site: http://www.example.com (which is London based English site).

The website has an option on top right side of the website which says translate the website into French.

The person clicks on the translate to French and the website gets translated into French and the URL changes to: http://www.example.com/fr , he happily looks at the content and order a product . Happy French Customer.

Now I want to block the search engines to crawl and index the /fr folder.

I would block them through: Robots.txt &
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW">

Now suppose the company has a website which targets customers in France as well and they have a website: http://www.example.fr

Now to be on the safe side can I add this canonical tag : <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.fr"/> in the above URL: http://www.example.com/fr , just to be on the safe side.

And by using rel=”canonical” map all the /fr folder http://www.example.com/fr/product-name URLs to the http://www.example.fr/product-name URLs.

1)Does Yahoo and Bing support cross-domain support for the rel=”canonical” link element?

2)Does the above make sense should we add the translation on example.com if our customers are happy?

3) Will Google have any issues with the above?

4) Any Advice or alternatives ?

Ekon

8:09 pm on Mar 14, 2014 (gmt 0)

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Also should I block the crawlers or not ?

netmeg

8:21 pm on Mar 14, 2014 (gmt 0)

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First of all, if you block the French pages in robots.txt, they won't crawl in order to see the NOINDEX. And you could end up with indexed URLs that just say "no description available due to this site's robots.txt" or whatever.

Ekon

9:54 pm on Mar 14, 2014 (gmt 0)

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netmeg what would you recommend in this situation. Is it wise to really translate pages when you already have www.example.fr

lucy24

1:33 am on Mar 15, 2014 (gmt 0)

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Is it wise to really translate pages when you already have www.example.fr

Makes no sense to me. Well, if you're talking about autotranslation, you can leave off the "if" and just say it isn't wise, period :) But even if you mean real, custom-made translations...

Would
www.example.com/fr/blahblah
and
www.example.fr/blahblah
be the identical page? That is, different physical pages but the same content? I don't know anything about SEO* but it seems like you would need to have some major advantages just to outweigh the extra bother and inconvenience of maintaining parallel content.

Do the two sites live on the same server? Could you do something under the hood so each pair really is a single page?

Important. Is the content of the .fr site specific to France, or is it only the language? Which version would someone from Quebec choose if they were presented with both? Which version would you want people to use?

* This is a severe understatement.

phranque

4:21 am on Mar 15, 2014 (gmt 0)

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http://www.example.fr/ should be content intended for visitors from France.
this content will appear in the google.fr index.

your content in http://www.example.com/fr/ appears to be intended for French language speaking visitors that are not necessarily from France.
this content would not normally appear in the google.fr index unless you set the geotargeting for that subdirectory in GWT.

visitors from French IPs and visitors who speak French but aren't in France should be two different audiences.
if the content is different it is not duplicate content.

Ekon

12:21 pm on Mar 15, 2014 (gmt 0)

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lucy24 the http://www.example.fr will be for customers in France especially but it could be targeted in Quebec or any other place where there are french speaking customers. Google would show some of the results in SERPs if someone from Quebec or any other french speaking countries put in their query in search using french language.

Phranque how much would one change the content on http://www.example.fr and http://www.example.com/fr it's not realistically possible for thousands of pages to be changed completely. There will always be a duplication problem, and the pages from .com/fr and .fr will always compete against each other in search results.

Ekon

12:24 pm on Mar 15, 2014 (gmt 0)

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From my point of view the above translation of pages will create some issues for SEO such as someone linking to the wrong URLs which are already blocked by robots and Meta tags, where we lose not just the link juice but if it’s tweeted or shared on other social media we could lose some social signal benefits , and if the meta tag has noindex,follow in the above translated pages it will take up the google crawl time and resources which could have adverse impact on rankings because it may extend the lag time between fetches for indexable content.

The customer coming from organic searches, paid or any other way and landing on http://www.example.com would probably
be coming after typing in their query in English whether it’s in search or when ad is shown to them in English language , do you really think they would go and change their language and see the crappy translated content on http://www.example.com/fr

Ekon

12:34 pm on Mar 15, 2014 (gmt 0)

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Some text taken from Google: [googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk...]

We recommend that you do not allow automated translations to get indexed. Automated translations don’t always make sense and they could potentially be viewed as spam. More importantly, the point of making a multilingual website is to reach a larger audience by providing valuable content in several languages. If your users can’t understand an automated translation or if it feels artificial to them, you should ask yourself whether you really want to present this kind of content to them.

netmeg

2:39 pm on Mar 15, 2014 (gmt 0)

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The surest way is NOINDEX. I wouldn't disallow them in robots.txt, because they could still end up in the index that way.

aakk9999

6:22 pm on Mar 15, 2014 (gmt 0)

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I am lost here.

If the company has a site in English (example.com) and a site in French (example.fr), why not take a visitor to a French site when the visitor clicks on the French language change?

I am assuming that the example.com/fr/some-page is identical to example.fr/some-page because of wanting to implement rel canonical.

Or in other words, what would be the benefit of example.com/fr/ over the example.fr ? What are you trying to achieve with having two sites in French?

Ekon

5:57 pm on Mar 16, 2014 (gmt 0)

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netmeg will not disallow it in robots.txt. Thanksssss.

aakk9999 to make it easier for the customers living in English countries when English is not their first language.

Many thanks all for the replies. I will keep you all posted if the website I am trying to help goes live with the language option, I personally think it not a good idea , but let's see how it gets screwed and wastes time, money and energy.

lucy24

10:31 pm on Mar 16, 2014 (gmt 0)

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Wait, wait, wait! It isn't live yet? Then this is your chance to figure out everything beforehand. It's much easier to set things up right in the first place than to have to go back later slapping around redirects and Canonical tags.

If the difference is primarily in language, what do you gain from having a .fr at all? Do a lot of humans in France prefer to do their browsing on .fr sites when there's a choice?

Ekon

5:35 pm on Mar 17, 2014 (gmt 0)

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lucy24 .fr website is for customers based in France only and /fr is for customers based in English speaking countries.

I am against it , but let's see what happens...