CODEWITHSUNDEEP
urlseourl-routingmultilingual
Deele
Deele

Reputation: 3684

Multilanguage sites and url naming

Which is SEO preferred way to create page hierarchy for multilingual sites, where content in all supported languages reside on same domain.

My idea is following: when user opens domain.com, page creator has a choice:

  1. Show language selector/intro page
  2. Automatically detect user browser preferred language or use default, and redirect user to language specific home page
  3. Automatically redirect user to default language specific home page

Home page is not /en, but /en/home, so, when user opens domain.com, he will be redirected to domain.com/[language code]/[language specific home page alias].

All pages and content entities should use language specific aliases.

Page hierarchy would look like this:

domain.com
domain.com/en/home
domain.com/en/about-me
domain.com/en/catalog
domain.com/en/product/pineapple
domain.com/ru/dom
domain.com/ru/o-sebe
domain.com/ru/katalog
domain.com/ru/produkt/ananas

When url domain.com/[language specific home page alias] is entered, user is redirected to domain.com/[language code]/[language specific home page alias] or to default language, if [language specific home page alias] is not unique.

So, the question is: are these rules good practice and if not, what should be changed?

I have seen people putting [language code] as last segment domain.com/[language specific home page alias]/[language code], but that does not let translated aliases, and page hierarchy looks something like:

domain.com
domain.com/home/en
domain.com/home/ru
domain.com/about-me/en
domain.com/about-me/ru
domain.com/catalog/en
domain.com/catalog/ru
domain.com/product/pineapple/en
domain.com/product/pineapple/ru

I understand, it depends on project and client needs, but there should be some "best practice" (that I was not able to find) for this purpose, that is accepted by most search engines.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 324

Answers (1)

user969068
user969068

Reputation: 2943

Your URL structure looks good, there are also other URL structure available:

ccTLDs - example.ie
Subdomains with gTLDS  -  de.example.com
Subdirectories with gTLDs - example.com/de/

You can also use URL parameters like example.com?lang=en but its not recommended. Here is a complete info on how Google handle Multi-regional and multilingual sites. Dont forget to read all 3 topics there.

Upvotes: 1

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