SEO-ing a Multilingual site

[kevsta]

hi all. ok so my hobbyism in SEOing my own sites over the last 18 months or so, along with a recent emigration now finds me a veritable expert on the subject among my friends and colleagues here, all of whom seem to have websites needing looking at, and I've just landed my first "client" SEOing a friend's site.

it's quite a nice site as far as usability is concerned but anything I do SEOwise will be an improvement, as this has never been considered thus far and they arent in the first top ten pages of any of the engines, for any searches we could find. so im pretty sure I can improve dramatically on that

however it is a 3 language site, English, Spanish & Italian, with language selection at the front page before entry. i've just set them up with adwords and am i'm only just installing GA so have no idea of current language split of users.

am wondering how best to go about it, should I focus on trying to SEO the English language site first and just raise backlink count (9 currently) or do I need to be thinking about all 3 simultaneously?

any thoughts?

edit: sorry, didnt say, its 3 language versions on one .com domain.

[incrediblehelp]

I would go language by language as each will present separate challenges and goals. That does suck they are all on one domain. Are the different websites on subfolders?

[kevsta]

yes theyre all in different subfolders at least. does that make a difference?

[jeffposaka]

Does each language have its own "home"page with unique url? Also which search engine is more important for the target language?

[bj]

If it's possible to do so, I'd make each part of the site into a subdomain. Google, at least, will then treat it like three different websites.

italian.yoursite.com
spanish.yoursite.com
english.yoursite.com

This can usually be done in cpanel by pointing the sub at the folder that will be the root of it.

If the site isn't well indexed and/or not showing well in searches, any changes you make now won't matter much. Better to set it up now so it'll have the best shot later, rather than trying to work with what you have.

At least that's what would seem to make the most sense to me, shy of creating three different domains/sites.

[thorfjalar]

A link to the italian section will help the whole site including the english section. Since there is less competition on the italian and spanish internet for $ keywords it might be more time efficiant to focus there. Also chances are that the bigger search engines have the capability to translate between the largest languages and give an english site with italian and spanish versions higher authority than a site with same info but only in english.

[Peter (IMC)]

It all depends on the countries you´re targeting. Inglish I guess is the usa, so a .com domain is fine, and you probably host in the usa, so that's fine too. As far as I know the italian language is only practical in Italy, unless you´re trying to target people in the usa for italian-english translations. If you´re targeting the italian language, I guess it doesn't really matter much, though I would go for a .it domain.

The spanish language is a completely different matter. What countries are you targeting? If it is spanish for the spanish speakers in the usa, you´re fine but if you´re targeting other countries you need to have a site for each country. Spanish is spoken in so many countries it would be impossible for a search engine to give useful results in each country without looking at domain names and in many cases also the location of the server.

[seo4china]

Using sub-domains is the way to go, I would keep the main page with the English version, but link to Spanish and Italian websites from there (es.yoursite.com, it.yoursite.com). But when promoting the country-specific websites in their own markets of course I would be using their specific sub-domains.

[ledelboy]

Originally Posted by Peter (IMC)

The spanish language is a completely different matter. What countries are you targeting? If it is spanish for the spanish speakers in the usa, you´re fine but if you´re targeting other countries you need to have a site for each country.

I beg to differ. Having several country sites/addresses for Spanish, which is a single language is a total overkill. For writing/reading purposes, there is not such thing as Spanish Spanish, Mexican Spanish or Argentinian Spanish. Furthermore, the vast majority of Spanish language websites are .com. ,mx, .ar, .cl, ,pe etc. are a small minority.

Subdomains will help, but probably the most important individual thing is to make sure that the language tags are correct. Declare lang="es", lang="en" and lang="it" the spiders will know their way. This looks obvious. It is not. Most multi-lingual sites just forget to straighten up their lang tags.

[astro]

[quote:] Subdomains will help, but probably the most important individual thing is to make sure that the language tags are correct. Declare lang="es", lang="en" and lang="it" the spiders will know their way. This looks obvious. It is not. Most multi-lingual sites just forget to straighten up their lang tags.[/quote]

Felt like I had been slapped round the face with a wet fish...it is sooo obvious yet I missed that one! Take it Greek is ="gr"

Interesting I have the same problem with a site in english and greek. The guy wanted Italian as well but as neither of us actually speak the language correcting the translation and answering emails was academic!

I also take it there are listing problems associated with multi-lingual sites, does it get ignored or listed on page 101 if strange text is detected like greek?

I will never offer to do another one!

[/astro]

[kevsta]

thanks guys, some good info here.

[computergenius]

I have just inherited a site which is currently 2 languages, with language tags correctly set. However, each URL has two sets of content, one in each language - that is, the URL is identical for both languages.

At the moment, the only language in Google appears to be English - the other language is reached via a 'choose language' drop down, and isn't in the sitemap, so I think that Google would have difficulty reading it.

I guess that we need a different URL or subdomain for the second language - I think that if we start telling SEs about the same URL in the second language, it will cause confusion.

I assume from the previous posts that this is what other people think as well. But what would be the effect of leaving it as it is? I would guess that it would reduce the English language visibility because of SE confusion.

[rosiee007]

I'm working on a few multilingual sites, but they are hosted on different domains, like sitename.de, sitename.dk, sitename.fi which solves a lot of problems. However, the biggest problem with those sites is that they don't have a separate english version. The english version actually exists on all the sites after the user clicks on the 'English version' link which sets the cookie for that session. The english versions have different URLs completely, but they don't open directly unless the cookie is set. So I'm focusing on optimizing the pages and getting links for the non-english URLs and pages with non-english anchor texts in links.

[webmax]

Peter's got it right. Decide what Spanish-speaking countries you want to target and buy country-specific domains. We are Costa Rica based and work on a lot of English-Spanish sites. For G searches performed here in Costa Rica, co.cr domains tend to show up on top no matter where they're hosted or if they're nicely optimized or not. But perform the same search from Italy or the US, and you get different results, in which case, .ar and .mex tend to do better than the other smaller country domains like .co.cr or .gt.
Depending on what you are selling, you will need to adjust the language a little bit. Subjects like politics, economics, medicine, history, and the like will read nicely in any Spanish-speaking country. But things like the names of fruits, foods, car parts, and household items may be radically different. Same thing with adjectives. Yes, there are general words that can be understood in most countries for a specific item. So try to choose someone that knows the differences and can write accordingly.
Avoid having someone from Spain write for Latin America, unless they have lived on this side of the pond for some time. To illustrate how different Spanish from Spain can be from Latin American Spanish, I'll tell you a little story. We took our Costa Rica born, Spanish-speaking 8 year old son to Italy for a few weeks. We traveled through several Italian cities. Then we went to Spain. After 3 days in Spain, my son asked for ice cream - get this - in Italian. He had not realized we were in a different country. For him, Spanish from Spain was about as unintelligible as Italian, and of course Madrid was just another city of weird old buildings. Just the ice cream was not the same, definitely.

[kevsta]

Country-wise is the Spanish Spanish speakers theyre mainly targetting i.e. Spain so not too much difficulty there.

thanks again for all yr help

[Peter (IMC)]

Originally Posted by kevsta

Country-wise is the Spanish Spanish speakers theyre mainly targetting i.e. Spain so not too much difficulty there.

thanks again for all yr help

Well, then you definitely need a spanish domain to target spain. How is google going to figure out that your spanish language site is targeting spain unless it is a spanish domain?

Well, they actually can figure that out as it should have many links from other spanish websits. But still, I wouldn't be surprised if they look at the domain extention as well. Maybe they even look at the physical location of the hosting, like they do for the UK.

[david_324]

make different site for one specific language will be good for search engines and as well as visitor's just make add-on domains

enjoy traffic




seomaster

[webmax]

Peter, they don't care where the site is hosted. The country-specific domain is more important than that. We have country-specific domains hosted all over, and as long as they have their nice little .cr ending, they absolutely rule down here. We don't even have to work that hard to get our sites to the top.