3.02 - Multilingual / international SEO

1 - Findings and impacts

If your website and your content are intended to be distributed in several geographical areas, for different nationalities or in different languages, a very specific procedure must be followed to ensure that search engines deliver the right page to the right users, and especially in the right language.

Eg. - what is more annoying than getting a product page with a price displayed in dollars for an English person?

2 - Recommendations

Good content

It is essential to present translated but most importantly localized content in the different languages / regions your visitors might be coming from.

The good support

Always favour dedicated TLD to deliver your content to the right geographical area. Apart from the language used on the page, this element is an indicator for search engines to guide the distribution of your content.

https://www.cdkeys.fr for FRANCE

https://www.cdkeys.de for GERMANY

https://www.cdkeys.com for the USA

https://www.cdkeys.co.uk for ENGLAND

etc

We recommend using domain extensions (ccTLDs) over other management systems, which are generally less optimized on an SEO point of view. The other options are:

sub-domains: fr.cdkeys.com
sub-directories: cdkeys.com/fr

We recommend the use of sub-directories if you don't want to opt for ccTLDs:

https://www.cdkeys.com/fr/ for France

https://www.cdkeys.com/it/ for Italy

Reorientation pop-in & redirections based on the IP address

If the user does not consult the site in the correct language, suggest a javascript pop-in suggesting the better version (by detecting the user's browser's language for example)

Outsource this JavaScript directive and block it by robots.txt to make sure Googlebot does not try to access it.

As a result of that, Googlebot will not be subjected to this alert and will be able to explore the requested page without being redirected to another version of the page in another language.

Then, place a cookie based on the choice of the user so he can systematic be redirected to the good version of the language when he comes back to your site. Googlebot does not take cookies into consideration so the search engine spiders will continue to explore the page.

WARNING

Never redirect the user based on his IP address! The risk of this configuration is to hide a part of your website to Google, as its crawlers have American IP addresses 80% of the time.

Language switcher

First of all, make sure it stands out. Ask a friend to locate the language switcher on your site. If it takes her/him more than a few seconds, you might reconsider its location.

It is essential to let the user the possibility to change the language on ALL of your pages via the language switcher. This is an effective way to make your different pages accessible to search engines.

To avoid losing the user along his journey on your website, you have to make sure that changing the language will redirect him to the corresponding page in the other language he selects and does not redirect him to the Homepage!

WARNING

Switching to another language must remove the redirection cookie so that the user can perform the switch.

In order to reinforce internal linking between the different versions available, the language switcher must suggest the other versions of languages via a hypertext <a href> link, accessible to crawlers/search engines.

The hreflang attribute

The hreflang attributes tell Google about available translations. Google uses the hreflang attributes to serve the correct language or regional URL in Search results.
When used correctly, hreflang attributes can dramatically improve search engine positioning.
Use Google Search Console to check if you don’t have any hreflang tags with Errors
Because each page offers an alternative in another language (and therefore another URL) use the rel = "substitute" hreflang = "x" annotations in your source code to suggest to engines like Googlebot the equivalent URLs available. On each page, put in your <head> the following line depending on the languages available obviously:

-----------

For example, if I have a page in French that can also be translated into German or English, I am going to specify Google that equivalent URLs are available in other languages:

-----------

BUILDING HREF LANG ATTRIBUTES

You need to add this attribute in the source code of all the pages of the website, for all available languages. The content of the HREFLANG attribute is built in this order:

Identify the language in ISO 639-1 format. All language codes available HERE
Identify the region in ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2 format. All country codes available HERE

Common mistakes with hreflang usage:

Missing return links: If page X links to page Y, page Y must link back to page X. If this is not the case for all pages that use hreflang annotations, those annotations may be ignored or not interpreted correctly.
Each language version must list itself as well as all other language versions.
Alternate URLs must be fully-qualified, including the transport method (http/https), so:

https://example.com/foo, not //example.com/foo or /foo

Always use the x-default tag for unmatched languages (use the .com)

The reserved value hreflang="x-default" is used when no other language/region matches the user's browser setting. This value is optional, but recommended, as a way for you to control the page when no languages match. A good use is to target your site's homepage where there is a clickable map that enables the user to select their country.

Another method for indicating your alternate pages: SITEMAP (but not recommended-please inform us if you are choosing this method)

(Please prefer the implementation of HREFLANG tags in your Html source code directly)

You can also use a Sitemap to tell Google all of the language and region variants for each URL. To do so, add a <loc> element specifying a single URL, with child <xhtml:link> entries listing every language/locale variant of the page including itself. Therefore if you have 3 versions of a page, your sitemap will have 3 entries, each with 3 identical child entries.

Sitemap rules:

Specify the xhtml namespace as follows:
xmlns:xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
Create a separate <url> element for each URL.
Each <url> element must include a <loc> child indicating the page URL.
Each <url> element must have a child element <xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="supported_language-code"> that lists every alternate version of the page, including itself. The order of these child <xhtml:link> elements doesn't matter, though you might want to keep them in the same order to make them easier for you to check for mistakes.
See the additional guidelines.

Example

Here is an English language page targeted at English speakers worldwide, with equivalent versions of this page targeted at German speakers worldwide and German speakers located in Switzerland. Here are all the URLs present on your site:

www.example.com/english/page.html, targeted at English speakers.
www.example.com/deutsch/page.html targeted at German speakers.
www.example.com/schweiz-deutsch/page.html targeted at German speakers in Switzerland.

Here is the sitemap for those three pages:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"

  xmlns:xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

  <url>

    <loc>http://www.example.com/english/page.html</loc>

    <xhtml:link

               rel="alternate"

               hreflang="de"

               href="http://www.example.com/deutsch/page.html"/>

    <xhtml:link

               rel="alternate"

               hreflang="de-ch"

               href="http://www.example.com/schweiz-deutsch/page.html"/>

    <xhtml:link

               rel="alternate"

               hreflang="en"

               href="http://www.example.com/english/page.html"/>

  </url>

  <url>

    <loc>http://www.example.com/deutsch/page.html</loc>

    <xhtml:link

               rel="alternate"

               hreflang="de"

               href="http://www.example.com/deutsch/page.html"/>

    <xhtml:link

               rel="alternate"

               hreflang="de-ch"

               href="http://www.example.com/schweiz-deutsch/page.html"/>

    <xhtml:link

               rel="alternate"

               hreflang="en"

               href="http://www.example.com/english/page.html"/>

  </url>

  <url>

    <loc>http://www.example.com/schweiz-deutsch/page.html</loc>

    <xhtml:link

               rel="alternate"

               hreflang="de"

               href="http://www.example.com/deutsch/page.html"/>

    <xhtml:link

               rel="alternate"

               hreflang="de-ch"

               href="http://www.example.com/schweiz-deutsch/page.html"/>

    <xhtml:link

               rel="alternate"

               hreflang="en"

               href="http://www.example.com/english/page.html"/>

  </url>

</urlset>

Geographical location of your server

Prefer a web hosting in a geographical zone that will be close to where most of your traffic is. So, if Saudi Arabia is where most of your traffic is coming from, host your site on a Saudi server.

The benefit of doing so is to deliver elements to your users more quickly and speed up your load times.

If a good portion of your traffic is coming from other countries quite regularly, use a CDN to provide an equally smooth browsing experience for these users too. The use of CDN (Content Delivery Network) allows web users to load the static content of your pages (images, JavaScript and hidden CSS files) from a server that is located as close as possible to their location. Using a CDN will allow your content to be delivered from a maximum number of servers around the planet, always as close as possible to the user's location.

Amazon Cloudfront or CloudFlare are good CDNs, which can cache your site's pages and deliver them from their many servers around the globe. They also protect your site by filtering incoming traffic preventing your site to be hit by DDoS attacks, they allow you to switch to HTTP2, keep your site online even when your hosting has fallen, and much more ... CDNs also provide protection from large surges in traffic.

GSC Targeting

Google Search Console geo-targeting allows Google to identify what the target audience of your website is, and build its index accordingly. When targeting a country, Google will push your website to the users located in the geographical area targeted for relevancy and UX reasons. But in return, your rankings won't be as good for the regions you are not targeting, even if the language used is identical.

As a reminder, for a query made in a specific language, 2 users located in 2 different countries will not have the same results. Google knows that it is probably not relevant to suggest the website of a restaurant located in Montreal to a user located in Paris and who is looking for restaurant options.

When you have a dedicated websites per country, GSC can help you implement some relevant geographical targeting. It becomes even more useful when your local websites do not have an extension that helps Google understand which country you are targeting (eg: with a '.com' or 'brand' or 'net') or even when you use sub-directories (.com/fr-fr, .com/fr-be, .com/es-es etc).

Setting a country target

You can specify a target country in the International Targeting report.

Go to your Google Search Console account
On the International Targeting report, click the Country tab.
Check the Geographic target checkbox and choose your country target. If you want to ensure that your site is not associated with any country or region, select Unlisted in the drop-down list.

WARNING

This setting is only for geographic data. If you're targeting users in different locations—for example, if you have a site in French that you want users in France, Canada, and Mali to read—don't use this tool to set France as a geographic target. A good example of where it would be useful is for a restaurant website: if the restaurant is in Canada, it's probably not of interest to folks in France. But if your content is in French and is of interest to people in multiple countries/regions, it's probably better not to restrict it.

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