• majorAlexa

        See all notifications

        Skip to content
        Moz logo Menu open Menu close
        • Products
          • Moz Pro
          • Moz Pro Home
          • Moz Local
          • Moz Local Home
          • STAT
          • Moz API
          • Moz API Home
          • Compare SEO Products
          • Moz Data
        • Free SEO Tools
          • Domain Analysis
          • Keyword Explorer
          • Link Explorer
          • Competitive Research
          • MozBar
          • More Free SEO Tools
        • Learn SEO
          • Beginner's Guide to SEO
          • SEO Learning Center
          • Moz Academy
          • MozCon
          • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
        • Blog
        • Why Moz
          • Digital Marketers
          • Agency Solutions
          • Enterprise Solutions
          • Small Business Solutions
          • The Moz Story
          • New Releases
        • Log in
        • Log out
        • Products
          • Moz Pro

            Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

          • Moz Local

            Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

          • STAT

            SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

          • Moz API

            Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

          • Compare SEO Products

            See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

          • Moz Data

            Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

          Let your reputation grow with Reviews AI
          Moz Local

          Let your reputation grow with Reviews AI

          Learn more
        • Free SEO Tools
          • Domain Analysis

            Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

          • Keyword Explorer

            Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

          • Link Explorer

            Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

          • Competitive Research

            Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

          • MozBar

            See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

          • More Free SEO Tools

            Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

          NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
          Moz Pro

          NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

          Learn more
        • Learn SEO
          • Beginner's Guide to SEO

            The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

          • SEO Learning Center

            Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

          • On-Demand Webinars

            Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

          • How-To Guides

            Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

          • Moz Academy

            Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

          • MozCon

            Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

          Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
          Moz API

          Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

          Find your plan
        • Blog
        • Why Moz
          • Digital Marketers

            Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

          • Small Business Solutions

            Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

          • Agency Solutions

            Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

          • Enterprise Solutions

            Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

          • The Moz Story

            Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

          • New Releases

            Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

          Surface actionable competitive intel
          New Feature

          Surface actionable competitive intel

          Learn More
        • Log in
          • Moz Pro
          • Moz Local
          • Moz Local Dashboard
          • Moz API
          • Moz API Dashboard
          • Moz Academy
        • Avatar
          • Moz Home
          • Notifications
          • Account & Billing
          • Manage Users
          • Community Profile
          • My Q&A
          • My Videos
          • Log Out

        The Moz Q&A Forum

        • Forum
        • Questions
        • My Q&A
        • Users
        • Ask the Community

        Welcome to the Q&A Forum

        Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

        1. Home
        2. SEO Tactics
        3. Technical SEO
        4. Best practice for URL - Language/country

        Moz Q&A is closed.

        After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

        Best practice for URL - Language/country

        Technical SEO
        4
        4
        4829
        Loading More Posts
        • Watching

          Notify me of new replies.
          Show question in unread.

        • Not Watching

          Do not notify me of new replies.
          Show question in unread if category is not ignored.

        • Ignoring

          Do not notify me of new replies.
          Do not show question in unread.

        • Oldest to Newest
        • Newest to Oldest
        • Most Votes
        Reply
        • Reply as question
        Locked
        This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
        • 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
                • 1 / 1
                • First post
                  Last post

                Browse Questions

                Explore more categories

                • Moz Tools

                  Chat with the community about the Moz tools.

                • SEO Tactics

                  Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers

                • Community

                  Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!

                • Digital Marketing

                  Chat about tactics outside of SEO

                • Research & Trends

                  Dive into research and trends in the search industry.

                • Support

                  Connect on product support and feature requests.

                • See all categories

                Related Questions

                • acsilver

                  What do you do with product pages that are no longer used ? Delete/redirect to category/404 etc

                  We have a store with thousands of active items and thousands of sold items. Each product is unique so only one of each. All products are pinned and pushed online ... and then they sell and we have a product page for a sold item. All products are keyword researched and often can rank well for longtail keywords Would you :- 1. delete the page and let it 404 (we will get thousands) 2. See if the page has a decent PA, incoming links and traffic and if so redirect to a RELEVANT category page ? ~(again there will be thousands) 3. Re use the page for another product - for example a sold ruby ring gets replaces with ta new ruby ring and we use that same page /url for the new item. Gemma

                  Technical SEO | | acsilver
                  0
                • GoMentor

                  Best way to change URL for already ranking pages

                  Hello. I have a lot of pages that I'm optimising. The ones I'm focusing on right now is already ranking, but the URLs could be better (they don't include the keywords right now). However I'm worried that if I change the URLs they will drop in rankings or have to start over. I would of course set up 301 redirect, but is there more I need to do? What is the best way to change URL for already ranking pages?

                  Technical SEO | | GoMentor
                  0
                • jayoliverwright

                  Tools/Software that can crawl all image URLs in a site

                  Excluding Screaming Frog, what other tools/software to use in order to crawl all image URLs in a site? Because in Screaming Frog, they don't crawl image URLs which are not under the site domain. Example of an image URL outside the client site: http://cdn.shopify.com/images/this-is-just-a-sample.png If the client is: http://www.example.com, Screaming Frog only crawls images under it like, http://www.example.com/images/this-is-just-a-sample.png

                  Technical SEO | | jayoliverwright
                  0
                • RoxBrock

                  Do I use /es/, /mx/ or /es-mx/ for my Spanish site for Mexico only

                  I currently have the Spanish version of my site under myurl.com/es/ When I was at Pubcon in Vegas last year a panel reviewed my site and said the Spanish version should be in /mx/ rather than /es/ since es is for Spain only and my site is for Mexico only. Today while trying to find information on the web I found /es-mx/ as a possibility. I am changing my site and was planning to change to /mx/ but want confirmation on the correct way to do this. Does anyone have a link to Google documentation that will tell me for sure what to use here? The documentation I read led me to the /es/ but I cannot find that now.

                  Technical SEO | | RoxBrock
                  0
                • M_D_Golden_Peak

                  How to Remove /feed URLs from Google's Index

                  Hey everyone, I have an issue with RSS /feed URLs being indexed by Google for some of our Wordpress sites. Have a look at this Google query, and click to show omitted search results. You'll see we have 500+ /feed URLs indexed by Google, for our many category pages/etc. Here is one of the example URLs: http://www.howdesign.com/design-creativity/fonts-typography/letterforms/attachment/gilhelveticatrade/feed/. Based on this content/code of the XML page, it looks like Wordpress is generating these: <generator>http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.2</generator> Any idea how to get them out of Google's index without 301 redirecting them? We need the Wordpress-generated RSS feeds to work for various uses. My first two thoughts are trying to work with our Development team to see if we can get a "noindex" meta robots tag on the pages, by they are dynamically-generated pages...so I'm not sure if that will be possible. Or, perhaps we can add a "feed" paramater to GWT "URL Parameters" section...but I don't want to limit Google from crawling these again...I figure I need Google to crawl them and see some code that says to get the pages out of their index...and THEN not crawl the pages anymore. I don't think the "Remove URL" feature in GWT will work, since that tool only removes URLs from the search results, not the actual Google index. FWIW, this site is using the Yoast plugin. We set every page type to "noindex" except for the homepage, Posts, Pages and Categories. We have other sites on Yoast that do not have any /feed URLs indexed by Google at all. Side note, the /robots.txt file was previously blocking crawling of the /feed URLs on this site, which is why you'll see that note in the Google SERPs when you click on the query link given in the first paragraph.

                  Technical SEO | | M_D_Golden_Peak
                  0
                • Tug-Agency

                  Video Sitemaps <video:content_loc>and<video:player_loc></video:player_loc></video:content_loc>

                  Hi guys, If I'm creating a video sitemap do I need to use both: video:content_locandvideo:player_loc</video:player_loc></video:content_loc> Or could I just use video:content_loc?</video:content_loc> Thanks

                  Technical SEO | | Tug-Agency
                  0
                • upick-162391

                  Trailing Slashes In Url use Canonical Url or 301 Redirect?

                  I was thinking of using 301 redirects for trailing slahes to no trailing slashes for my urls. EG: www.url.com/page1/ 301 redirect to www.url.com/page1 Already got a redirect for non-www to www already. Just wondering in my case would it be best to continue using htacces for the trailing slash redirect or just go with Canonical URLs?

                  Technical SEO | | upick-162391
                  0
                • fthead9

                  What is the best method to block a sub-domain, e.g. staging.domain.com/ from getting indexed?

                  Now that Google considers subdomains as part of the TLD I'm a little leery of testing robots.txt with something like: staging.domain.com
                  User-agent: *
                  Disallow: / in fear it might get the www.domain.com blocked as well. Has anyone had any success using robots.txt to block sub-domains? I know I could add a meta robots tag to the staging.domain.com pages but that would require a lot more work.

                  Technical SEO | | fthead9
                  0

                Get started with Moz Pro!

                Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                Start my free trial
                Products
                • Moz Pro
                • Moz Local
                • Moz API
                • Moz Data
                • STAT
                • Product Updates
                Moz Solutions
                • SMB Solutions
                • Agency Solutions
                • Enterprise Solutions
                • Digital Marketers
                Free SEO Tools
                • Domain Authority Checker
                • Link Explorer
                • Keyword Explorer
                • Competitive Research
                • Brand Authority Checker
                • Local Citation Checker
                • MozBar Extension
                • MozCast
                Resources
                • Blog
                • SEO Learning Center
                • Help Hub
                • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                • How-to Guides
                • Moz Academy
                • API Docs
                About Moz
                • About
                • Team
                • Careers
                • Contact
                Why Moz
                • Case Studies
                • Testimonials
                Get Involved
                • Become an Affiliate
                • MozCon
                • Webinars
                • Practical Marketer Series
                • MozPod
                Connect with us

                Contact the Help team

                Join our newsletter
                Moz logo
                © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                • Accessibility
                • Terms of Use
                • Privacy

                Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.