Multilingual Ecommerce Product Pages Best Practices

sedwards

Hi Mozzers,

We have a marketplace with 20k+ products, most of which are written in English. At the same time we support several different languages. This changes the chrome of the site (nav, footer, help text, buttons, everything we control) but leaves all the products in their original language.

This resulted in all kinds of duplicate content (pages, titles, descriptions) being detected by SEOMoz and GWT. After doing some research we implemented the on page rel="alternate" hreflang="x", seeing as our situation almost perfectly matched the first use case listed by Google on this page http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077.

This ended up not helping at all. Google still reports duplicate titles and descriptions for thousands of products, months after setting this up. We are thinking about changing to the sitemap implementation rel="alternate" hreflang="X", but are not sure if this will work either. Other options we have considered include noindex or blocks with robots.txt when the product language is not the same as the site language. That way the feature is still open to users while removing the duplicate pages for Google.

So I'm asking for input on best practice for getting Google to correctly recognize one product, with 6 different language views of that same product. Can anyone help?

Examples:

(Site in English, Product in English) http://website.com/products/product-72

(Site in Spanish, Product in English) http://website.com/es/products/product-72

(Site in German, Product in English) http://website.com/de/products/product-72

etc...

sedwards

Hi Gianluca,

Thanks for responding. I took a look at your guide, and I definitely understand the gold standard would be to get everything translated professionally, and provide a completely native experience.

Unfortunately due to our catalog size that would be prohibitively expensive, so I need to think of another solution. It sounds like from your guide that we are doing more harm than good, even with alternate language syntax in place.

Based on your answer, my thought would be to meta noindex any product page where the site language is not the same as the product. That way every page in the index will be 100% localized for potential visitors.

So if its a Spanish product index: site.com/es/product, but meta noindex site.com/de/product, site.com/product, etc.

If we follow that path, does it make sense to remove the alternate language syntax, since all the linked URLs will be no index?

Thanks again for your help.

gfiorelli1

Hi Scott,

sorry to tell you that you're doing International SEO quite bad. No offence, but what you describe is how not to do International SEO.

If you are targeting Spanish end users, you must localize in Spanish everything:

template elements;
URLs
products description
Titles
e.v.e.r.y.t.h.i.n.g

It is not just a question of SEO, but of usability too. Just revert the situation: what would be your reaction if you enter in a site, click on the english version and everything is written in Spanish?

Obviously, if you have the spanish version of your all in spanish, that will help a lot ranking for spanish queries.

In order to find an answer to your doubts, I warmly suggest you to read this guide to International SEO I wrote here on SEOmoz few time ago: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-dropping-the-information-dust

Ciao

gfiorelli1

Your answer is conceptually correct, but the implementation not that much.

This kind of URL is not the ideal: http://www.rentalinrome.com/trevifountainapartments_spa/treviluxurypenthouse

The best is to put every language mirror of your multilingual site in a subfolder: i.e. /es/ in the above cited case.

Google, in fact, understands better that the /es/, /de/, /fr/ subfolders are targeting Spanish, German and French, as those are the ISO codes for those languages.

The subfolders way, then, is even more suggested if you are targeting a country, because you can geotarget a subfolder in Google Webmasters Tools.

Finally, a warm suggestion: if you really want to be sure to rank in Russia, then you should think about Yandex SEO... which means:

Having the site in a .ru domain name (Yandex is biased toward russian domain terminations);
Have the site in russian.. also the URLs (yours is in english)