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        4. Best practice for URL - Language/country

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        • Kilgray
          Kilgray last edited by

          Hi,

          We are planning on having our website localized into more languages. We already have an English and German version. The German version is currently a sub-domain:

          www.example.com --> English version

          de.example.com --> German version

          Is this recommended? Or is it always better to have URLs with language prefixes such a:

          www.example.com/de

          www.example.com/es

          Which is a better practice in terms of SEO?

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
          • Daniel_Morgan
            Daniel_Morgan last edited by

            Hi Peter,

            Both really good answers to your questions above but maybe it would be good to give you some further pointing in the right direction. Perhaps you could answer the questions below and I can give you my personal opinion on which method would be best:

            • will you be putting an equal amount of marketing (content, PR, etc.) into the Spanish version for example compared with English?

            • are you able to offer  fully localised service eg, Spanish customer service, Spanish sales team etc.?

            • is your company well-known globally?

            It's important not to also forget that another option is using ccTLDs (eg, .co.uk, .com.au). These give the highest signal to search engines about the country being targeted and also importantly make you look more "local" which can do wonders for increasing conversion rate in countries where your company is not well-known.

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
            • BlueprintMarketing
              BlueprintMarketing last edited by

              I think that Tom gave you one of the best answers possible.

              However I hope this helps your site structure should be very similar to one contained in the two URL's

              If I may add a little bit of information that I thought was helpful

              • https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en
              • https://www.deepcrawl.com/knowledge/best-practice/hreflang-101-how-to-avoid-international-duplication/

              WHERE TO ADD YOUR HREFLANG TAGS

              You can add hreflang tags to your sitemaps, in the HTTP response headers, or on the page itself.

              IN YOUR SITEMAPS

              The best place to add hreflang is in your sitemap as including them in the headers or on the page adds weight to every single page request.

              The following example will inform Google about the English version from the German version of the website:

              <url>   <loc>http://www.example.com/deutsch/</loc></url>

              <xhtml:link< span="">                  rel=”alternate”                 hreflang=”en”                 href=”http://www.example.com/english/”                 />         <xhtml:link < span="">rel=”alternate”                 hreflang=”de”                 href=”http://www.example.com/deutsch/”                 /></xhtml:link <></xhtml:link<>

              This method would need to be repeated in full for every page on the site and for all the international websites.

              IN YOUR HEADERS AND HTML

              Hreflang tags can also be added to the HTTP header:

              Link: http://www.example.com/english/; rel=”alternate”; hreflang=”en” Link: http://www.example.com/deutsch/; rel=”alternate”; hreflang=”de”

              Or in the tag in the HTML:

              http://www.example.com/english/” /> http://www.example.com/deutsch/

              & because you will be creating a new site

              https://www.candidsky.com/blog/the-seo-2015-guide-to-website-migration/

              it would come down to your backlink profile if it were me I would use

              Moz open site Explorer,  Majestic, Ahrefs  and Google Webmaster tools to determine whether or not I will be receiving a enough Backlinks for a subdomain or separate TLD otherwise I would use a subfolder and an extremely fast method of hosting the site  Fastly is excellent or many other great methods as well.

              Hope this helps,

              Tom

              PS use

              http://hreflang.ninja/  to check

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
              • TomRayner
                TomRayner last edited by

                Hi Peter

                Both are viable options.

                I'd highly recommend going through Aleyda Solis' international SEO posts here on the Moz blog.  They can teach how to prepare for international SEO, how to approach site structure and how to generate relevant code and hreflang tags.

                Here is her international SEO checklist

                Here is her Hreflang blog post and generator tool

                And 40 tools to help advance your international SEO

                They're great reading and nothing that I'd be able to do add to, so I hope this helps!

                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 3
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