Home » Articles » Guidelines to optimize multi regional and multilingual sites

General steps to be taken while optimizing websites with many regional versions -

• Google does not give weightage to code level language such as lang attributes
• Avoid side by side translations and try to use single language for content and navigation on each page.
• Avoid translating the boilerplate text and keeping the remaining bulk content in a single language. **
• Avoid automatic translation, as they do not make sense and hence are considered as spam. **
• Use robots.txt to block Google from crawling automatically translated content, if any.
• Use separate URL for each language, carefully chosen to indicate human users which page’s language is about to load.
• It is okay to use –
  • translated words in the URL
  • Internationalized domain name e.g.
    http://ανεξαμπλεδομάιν.γρ
• Prefer UTF-8 encoding in the URL (list of URL encoders - http://goo.gl/SvK0h)
• Cross link each language version of the page.
• Avoid automatic redirection based on the user’s perceived language **

In case your regional site have –

• mostly user generated content on your site and you have to keep the bulk of your content in a single language, with the option of translating just the navigation and footer, or
• you have regional versions for your website, e.g. en-us, en-gb etc. but each version differs in only small details, or
• you want French version of the page to be delivered to French speakers, English version to be delivered to English speakers and so on, without using automatic translations

You should choose to use rel="alternate" hreflang="x".

Note - This option should not be used if the website has entirely different content for each regional version of the website.

Serving correct language URL to searchers - 

Suppose you have created a profile in a Spanish version of a forum, which has many regional versions, such as French, English etc. and your profile gets translated to all versions, translating only the navigation etc. and keeping the main content in same Spanish language. Situation is, your canonical URL is something like –

http://es.forumname.com/profilename

And non-canonical URLs are –

http://en.forumname.com/profilename

http://fr.forumname.com/profilename

It has 2 step solution.

Step 1 – Picking the canonical URL

Step 2 – Using rel="alternate" hreflang="x"

Step 1 – Picking the canonical URL –

Method 1 – Set a cookie to record user's preference and 301 redirect non canonical URL to canonical URL Thus when a user whose language preference has been recorded as French opens http://fr.forumname.com/profilename, he/she will be redirected to the canonical URL i.e. http://es.forumname.com/profilename however the same will rendered in French because of language preference set in cookie.

Method 2 – Using rel=”canonical” Implement this tag on each non-canonical URL.

Step 2 – Using rel="alternate" hreflang="x" –

This code is placed on canonical URL page template, repeatedly for each non canonical page i.e. the following code will be placed in HTML of http://es.forumname.com/profilename -

 <link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr" href="http://fr.forumname.com/profilename">

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="http://en.forumname.com/profilename">

In case there are numerous regional version, then instead of hard coding the rel="alternate" tag, it can also be coded, to dynamically choose the preferred language to be shown in hreflang attribute and the respective non canonical URL to be shown in href attribute. If you choose the dynamic method via coding, it is advisable to go by method 1 in step 1.

Written by SynapseInteractive Copywriting Team.