SEO For Multi-language and Multi-Currency Websites

Building a multi-language website is not a difficult task. But making it search friendly is a tricky task. In this article I will provide all possible solutions to make your multi-language website search friendly.

What is a Multi-language and Multi-currency website?

A multi-language website is a website which have different language versions of webpages each webpage with their lang attribute on HTML tag set to a different language. This is done for making website more user friendly to people who speak different languages.
Mostly International new channels, social networking sites etc have multiple language versions of their website.

Similarly multi-currency website is a website which have different currency versions of their website. Mostly E-commerce websites are multi-currency websites.

URL Structure For Multi-language/Multi-currency website?

Multi-language/Multi-currency website can be achieved by using any of the following URL structures:

Subdirectory
By creating different sub-directories.
For example: qnimate.com/us/apple-buys-beats/, qnimate.com/in/apple-buys-beats/, qnimate.com/kr/apple-buys-beats/, qnimate.com/apple-buys-beats/

Subdomains
By creating different sub-domains of the website.
For example: us.qnimate.com/apple-buys-beats/, in.qnimate.com/apple-buys-beats/, kr.qnimate.com/apple-buys-beats/, qnimate.com/apple-buys-beats/

TLDs
By creating different Top Level Domains of the website.
For example: qnimate.co.us/apple-buys-beats/, qnimate.co.in/apple-buys-beats/, qnimate.co.kr/apple-buys-beats/, qnimate.com/apple-buys-beats/

Different Domains
By creating different domains of the website.
For example: qnimateus.com/apple-buys-beats/, qnimateindia/apple-buys-beats/, qnimatekorean/apple-buys-beats/, qnimate.com/apple-buys-beats.

Dynamically Generated Language/Currency Content

Some websites keep the same url structure for all page but generate different content by tracking IP address. Google recommends not to use this method to implement a multi-language/multi-currency website.

For example, Its not always compulsory that korean people are only found in Korea, they can be anywhere around the world. And the Koreans in India will never be able to see the Korean version of the page if the page dynamically generates content according to IP address.

Search Problems In Multi-language/Multi-currency Websites

There are few problems search engines face while crawling, indexing and displaying search result of multi-language or multi-currency websites.

Identifying Language Variations
Suppose you have a news item in two different languages. And the urls are qnimate.com/us/apple-buys-beats/ and qnimate.com/uk/apple-buys-beats/. The first URL is for US users and then second URL is for UK users. But search engines don’t know this language variation you have implemented. Therefore search engines display any one page from these two in search result(search engines choose one from these two using page ranking factors but not by language factor). So there is chances that someone using google.co.uk will get qnimate.com/us/apple-buys-beats/ in search result instead of qnimate.com/uk/apple-buys-beats/.

Ranking Factors Of Pages
Let’s consider the same example as we considered above. As search engines don’t know that these two pages content same content in different languages, search engines will assign different search ranking to these two pages. But actually both should have same search ranking.

rel=”alternate” As A Solution To Search Problems

The above problems can be solved using rel=”alternate”.

Suppose we have five URLs with same content in different language or currency. Then we can apply rel=”alternate” this way:

us.qnimate.com/apple-buys-beats/

au.qnimate.com/apple-buys-beats/

en.qnimate.com/apple-buys-beats/

es.qnimate.com/apple-buys-beats/

qnimate.com/apple-buys-beats/

We have to provide all alternate links in all the multi variation pages of the same conent. This avoids outsiders claiming your webpages to be verions of their pages.

Now all the above links will have same search ranking power.

Search engine first finds the pages with matching words as the search query. Then filters using the google search language. And returns a single URL which is the best match.

Suppose a user using google.co.uk searches for “qnimate apple buys beats”, then all the five pages match the query. But only http://en.qnimate.com/apple-buys-beats is displayed as this is the english version of the page for english users apart from Australia and USA. If the same user searches for “qnimate apple buys beats spanish” then only http://es.qnimate.com/apple-buys-beats matches the search query and therefore google returns this page.

If a user using google.fr searches for “qnimate apple buys beats”, then all five pages match the search query. But as the user is using french version of google, google looks for french version of the pages. But doesn’t find a french version so returns http://qnimate.com/apple-buys-beats/ which is the default page. If the query is changed to “qnimate apple buys beats french” then no page matchs all the query words. Therefore none of the URLs will be listed in the search result.

How Is Multi-language SEO Different From National/Local SEO?

Local/National SEO is used to target users based on location but Multi-language SEO targets users based on language.

For example, While using Local/National SEO the searches made using google.com/?hl=bn, google.com/?hl=hi or google.com/?hl=mr are treated to be same. But for language SEO these three google searches represent different set of people.

Conclusion

I explained all the necessary elements for creating multi-language and multi-currency website. To learn more about rel=”alternate” click here. You can leave comments for more clarifications. Thanks for reading.