Multilingual Meta Tags on a Dynamic Site

[mgillis]

I'm about to launch a site in 4 languages, with three more coming in the next year. I have lists of translated keywords that I'd like to set in my Metas, but I'm not sure how to go about this properly.

The site is dynamically generated - therefore, "versions" of the site all reside on the same site driven from a central database.

Our site identifies the browser language settings and serves up the appropriate language from the backend. So really, we've only got one homepage and don't redirect the user anywhere.

Problem with Metas is that I feel that they can harm you more than they can help you. Because we are dynamically generated, we do rely on them to a certain extent. We cannot afford to alienate browsers that do look at them by doing this badly.

Help!

[Conficio]

Hi there,
I think you are on the right path already. In terms web standards, using negotiation to determine the preferred language of the browser (consumer) is the best way to go. I have tried to give factual inside to the subject of language negotiation in another post

I'm not sure from your question, what is your issue? Does your site not serve the meta tags in the appropriate language, together with the page body?

I'd like to point out, that you should use special meta tags to indicate the other language versions of the pages.

Hope that is helpful

K<o>

[MathsIsFun]

You might also find some interesting information in this thread on US vs UK Spelling. It may not initially seem relevant, but the whole language thing was discussed with lots of helpful advice.

[28overpar]

Have you had any thoughts yet on how you are going to market these multi-language versions of your main site?

If they are dynamically generated, does that mean that it will not be possible to submit these to, for example, Google.de, Google.fr etc etc?

Would these just be classed as duplicate sites? Or, do you have to get relevant IBL's from foreign language sites?

[Conficio]

Originally Posted by 28overpar

Have you had any thoughts yet on how you are going to market these multi-language versions of your main site?

If they are dynamically generated, does that mean that it will not be possible to submit these to, for example, Google.de, Google.fr etc etc?

Would these just be classed as duplicate sites? Or, do you have to get relevant IBL's from foreign language sites?

Don't worry they will be picked up as such. It might be beneficial to have domains that are international too, such as example.de, example.fr and example.co.uk. That will for sure get the preferred attention of the coutry versions of the search engines.

One questions: How can content in different languages be duplicates?

K<o>

[28overpar]

Unfortunately, it's not that easy to buy your domain with the suffix for another country. In most cases, you have to have a company set up in that country in order to obtain a mydomain.de or mydomain.fr web address.

Conficio wrote:
Don't worry they will be picked up as such.

I don't understand how they will be picked up if the site is dynamic. Please could you expand on this.

[mgillis]

So much great information, thanks to you all. I'll try to address your questions and answers here.

Conficio Said: Does your site not serve the meta tags in the appropriate language, together with the page body?

Right now, the answer is no. And I wasn't sure if it was possible because often times the static HTML sits outside the dynamic page - if I can get the DB to serve up the correct Meta Tags, we might be in business.

Excellent point about noting in the METAS that the pages are available in the other languages - I hadn't thought of it, but it will be very useful!

MathIsFun - Thanks for that link - I agree that if you are going international you need to be mindful of who you are speaking to. Unfortunately, at this point serving up multiple forms of English might be too much for my development team, but it is something to be every mindful of.

28overpar - At this point, because it is dynamic, we will be dependant on a linking strategy and advertising. We are soft launching for 3 months to work out any kinks that come out in regular use and then we will start to seriously advertise. The linking structure, however, will be built from day one.

Each language version of the site runs off one central domain - although we have multiple domains I don't think that we will be able to submit into multiple engines as they all really come back to the same address. However, I will be speaking to Google themselves about that one before making any final decisions.

Because of that, I do think that technically they are duplicate sites. However, because we are localizing Google and the others might be okay with a new directory submission.

Any more thoughts!
Thank you all very much for the food for thought!

[Conficio]

Originally Posted by mgillis

Each language version of the site runs off one central domain - although we have multiple domains I don't think that we will be able to submit into multiple engines as they all really come back to the same address. However, I will be speaking to Google themselves about that one before making any final decisions.

I would definitely do this. Try to get some advise from Google, when you ask them about your planned GoogleAd campaign. They might listen more carefully to you ;-)

Because of that, I do think that technically they are duplicate sites. However, because we are localizing Google and the others might be okay with a new directory submission.

I don't think so. Your pages are completely different in content and do not interlink that much or fully ( It is always the same URL in the link regardless of the language.

I definitely would get some schema that serves all pages dynamically and interjects even the appropriate URL for a localized domain. There are big advantages to localized domains, such as humans feel closer to the company/service/information, search engines prefer them for localized indexes, some directories only accept localized domains and many webmasters/bloggers/... like more to link to local resources.

You might investigate if you can use a proxy server that does the "localization" part for each localized domain, while the content is static and the dynamic parts are injected by your database application. I believe this could be your best option, requiring the least resources. You could even distribute the proxy servers (if they have a decent cache characteristic) closer to the end-users, once you hit enough load to justify this. Supposedly this improves your SE ranking even more.

K<o>