Multiligual sites

[Manish Verma]

hi,
can anybody explain me that what would be the effects if i made my site multilingual. effect on search engine position and page rank and please also post the reasons.

I'll be thankful to you.

Regards -

Manish

[Gurtie]

assuming you mean by creating different areas or subdomains for each language and not putting 6 languages on each page at the same time.

Then for existing pages/languages no effect at all unless you also make changes to existing page structure/names* PR would stay the same unless you do something tricky with internal page structure to more the PR around where you want it.

For new pages/languages you may or may not rank for new terms in the new languages. PR would work exactly as it does for other pages - you get links you get higher PR.

You really shouldn't go multi lingual for SEO purposes imho, doing a bad multi lingual site is counter-productive and the money you spend translating it properly would be better spent on other things if that's the only reason. A good multi lingual site is worthwhile but adding languages on when you didn't plan the site that way originally could cause you major headaches when you have to update it.

* You may increase the 'authority' of your site by offering more language options but I wouldn't bet on it.

[Manish Verma]

thanks for suggestion.

Regards -
Manish

[softplus]

What would you recommend for a bilingual site?

- same domain, same file, language via parameter (eg http://server.com/page.php?L=EN )
- same domain, different files (eg http://server.com/page-EN.php )
- different domains (eg http://server-EN.com/page.php)
- different TLDs (eg http://server.co.uk/page.php, http://server.de, etc.)

This is assuming you have exactly (or almost) the same content available in both languages, i.e. you would want the user to be able to switch between the two if he reaches the "wrong" page. It would be so much easier to just switch via parameter :-)

[Manish Verma]

i am doing with same domain, same file, language via parameter.
content may be differerent.

Regards -
Manish

[Gurtie]

What would you recommend for a bilingual site?

- same domain, same file, language via parameter (eg http://server.com/page.php?L=EN )
- same domain, different files (eg http://server.com/page-EN.php )
- different domains (eg http://server-EN.com/page.php)
- different TLDs (eg http://server.co.uk/page.php, http://server.de, etc.)

This is assuming you have exactly (or almost) the same content available in both languages, i.e. you would want the user to be able to switch between the two if he reaches the "wrong" page. It would be so much easier to just switch via parameter :-)

I've only ever done multilingual sites which are exact translations and use parameters (with mod rewrites sometimes). It can be quite complicated initially though because of the grammatical differences - given that for many languages you can't just dump text in a database but have to structure it differently the translating and checking can be a real fun job ;) (esp when you get to Arabic and other right to left languages)

I think perhaps if I was only doing two languages on a fairly small site and was a native speaker of both I'd be tempted to actually create the pages manually and flick between them by changing folders with a variable.

Hosting each 'site' in the appropriate country is slightly tricky using variables as well but there do seem to be a two or three ways around it. I'd be really interested if anyone has the definitive 'best method' for that :)

[AussieWebmaster]

We have our site in 8 languages apart from English. And yes Arabic is a bitch.

We have all separate domains with links to all others on each site. They were all translated by professionals and then double checked by the people here that spoke the language.

We have yet to host them in the respective countries, but we have most of the domains and also the company name language.com domains as well and they all forward to their respective sites.

We are getting some good placement in the country search engines.

[Andy AtkinsKruger]

Quick two cents....if there is a target market you can serve in a particular country/language, it is worth going mutlilingual because you may actually rank better because the competition is less.

This is not always the case (depends on the product/service) - but generally it is true that - all other things being equal - you will rank better in the new language simply because fewer sites target languages outside English.

[softplus]

Yeah, for many sites it's not a question of "if" you want to make international / multilingual versions, but "how". Usually, the technical part is the easier part (at least so I've noticed, at least for the latin languages (is that what you call them? english, german, french, italian, spanish, etc.)), the hard part is to make the user-experience flawless (+/- automatic) and still get the search engines to list you like a "one-language" site.

I made the mistake once of having the site automatically switch languages based on the cliient side information (IP -> country mapping, languages in the browser). While it's a good thing for the human visitors, search engines only spotted one language version and end up only listing it once. It took alot of work to take all the automatics out and go to a parameter-mapping version, with links to the language versions on every page; still I think search engines would probably like it even better if the different language sites were somehow better seperated on different domains, but they don't want to spend more money on that :-)). Anyone with more experience on this?

Why do sites like microsoft, hp just split it into subdirectories (i.e. http://hp.com/country/ch/de/....)? Does that work equally? Or are they not aiming for serps any more? Does the redirect from the local site (with a local domain) help get into the search engine of that country?

Thanks for the feedback, guys.

[Andy AtkinsKruger]

In my view, the safest route to language splitting is in order of priority the following:-


Local country domain ie mydomain.fr
Subdomain - ie fr.mydomain.com
Folders - ie mydomain.com/fr/


Then make sure you have local links pointing to the right pages ie English links to English pages, French links to French pages etc

The reason people don't always go country domain is because they can't for some reason - so then they choose subdomains or folders - which is next best

Worst is trying to do it all on a pure .com