I have developed a multi-lingual site in ASP.NET, which detects the user's system culture, and displays content in the appropriate language.
This is all working nicely, but my client has since had an SEO audit. The SEO agency has expressed a concern that this is not good SEO practice, as there are not unique URLs for each language.
They have suggested that the site may be accused of cloaking, and that google may not index the site correctly for each different language.
Any ideas on whether these are valid concerns, and if there is an advantage to having unique URLs for each language version of the site?
Although you have done a beautiful job switching Language automatically, the SEO Agency is correct!
That google may not index the site correctly for each diffferent language.
This is true! Google doesn't send the accept-language header last time I checked. This means that Google will only index the default language.
They have suggested that the site may be accused of cloaking,
This differs from your Excact implementation, but it is possible your site will receive a penalty!
There IS advantage having unique URLs (for each language version) on the site!
First of all, for your users: they can link to the language they prefer. Secondary for the Search Engines as they can index your site correctly.
I advice most of the time to redirect the user only on the home page for a language switch using a 302 redirect to the correct URL (and so the correct language). (edit: You can review the post by Matt Cutts "SEO Advice: Discussing 302 redirects")
To verify my advice: install fiddler and surf to http://www.ibm.com. As shown below, i received a 302 redirect to the appropriate language, arriving at www.ibm.com/be/en.
Result Protocol Host URL Body Caching Content-Type
4 302 HTTP www.ibm.com / 209 text/html
5 200 HTTP www.ibm.com /be/en/ 5.073 no-cache text/html;charset=UTF-8
There are a few solutions you can solve this:
Start Rewriting Urls (adding e.g. a directory using the language)
If you don't want to go through the hassle of adding directories (or rewriting url's) adding a QueryString would be the easiest solution (although try limiting them to maximum 2 parameters)
Another option is using different sub-domains! www.website.com for the default language, es.website.com, fr.website.com
Just make sure you supply every time the same content for the same URL.
Good luck with it!
Hopefully we will see some people answer who know about the internals of Google (anyone?). But most suppositions about how Google and others' crawlers are... suppositions, and subject to change.
My guess is that you should use separate URLs for languages, even if they just have a ?language= difference (although better would be a truly different URL). I believe this because when you go to google.it it says, google.com in English and that link goes to... google.com. In other words, Google itself uses different URLs for different languages.
Also, another big site, Microsoft (they probably know about SEO) uses
http://www.microsoft.com/en/us/default.aspx
for US-English and
http://www.microsoft.com/it/it/default.aspx
for Italy-Italian so it's probably best practice to differentiate based on language (and country).
In any case, I am totally annoyed when I'm on an English language computer and I can't see a site in Italian or Spanish, and vice-versa. As a usability, not SEO strategy, the user should be able to override the language suggestion. This is how most big sites handle languages, too.
Related
TL;DR Should I redirect from www.domain.tld to domain.tld or vice versa?
I am running a CMS that handles multiple domains. Until now the CMS is in charge of redirecting www.domain.tld to domain.tld or vice versa for each domain individually, but I've decided to let mod_rewrite handle that in the future for some reasons:
Performance: No need to fire up the CMS just to serve a http-redirect
Consistency: For "historical reasons", some domains do the redirect in one directions and some do it in the other direction. That's not a real problem, just gives me an itch.
Simplicity: Instead of having to worry about each domain individually, I'll have a solution for all existing and future(!) domains, even those that are not handled by the CMS.
I know how to implement that, but what I don't know is if there's a preferred "direction" of the redirect. I found very little information on that subject, but maybe I just searched for the wrong stuff. I remember having read somewhere (I believe at some page of Google's webmaster tools, but I can't find it right now), that it doesn't matter which one you choose as long as you stick to it.
Personally, I prefer domain.tld over www.domain.tld, that's how I type it in my browser, that's how I say it and that's how I write it, because I think that "www." is unnecessary garbage that looks bad, sounds bad, costs time (to read, to write or in a verbal conversation), space (in your address bar or when printed on paper) and bandwidth (I know, 4 bytes, but those 4 bytes accumulate).
But to be sure, I went to see how others do it and all the big "internet companies" (Google, Facebook, Yahoo, eBay, Amazon) as well as Apple and Microsoft redirect to www.domain.tld. Sites that cater to a more technical audience are split up: icann.org and w3.org redirect to the www version while for example jquery, github, stackoverflow redirect to the non-www version. In fact stack overflow's description of the 'no-www' tag says this:
The process of eliminating the usage of www to prefix URLs, for instance by redirecting users from http://www.example/ to http://example/. www is by many considered a dead and unnecessary practice.
So, are there any good reasons to prefer one over the other except the ones I already mentioned for getting rid of 'www.'? Or is it just a matter of personal taste and my findings are just a strange coincidence?
Side question
Not really a part of my current problem, but I noticed something intriguing and I'm curious: If there's https involved, most sites that I checked will handle it like this:
http://domain.tld -(301)-> https://domain.tld -(301)-> https://www.domain.tld
However Paypal uses a 301 only for the second redirect and 302 for the first and Apple (iCloud) does it with just one redirect:
http://icloud.com -(301)-> https://www.icloud.com
Can anyone think of a reason for doing this one way or the other?
OK, so apparently my research was sloppy and I posted this question on the wrong part of the vast stackexchange network.
If anyone should stumble upon this question, looking for some answers, I found all the answers and links to further materials on Webmasters:
Should I include “www” in my canonical URLs? What are the pros and cons?
and there's also a related thread on meta:
Why isn't stackoverflow using www in the URL?
I'm currently developing the layout of my new website. I plan to build a central website and subdomains for different aspects of my online presence.
name-lastname.de
portfolio.name-lastname.de
webdesign.name-lastname.de
nickname.name-lastname.de
I decided to create the central website as a hub for my other sites because even though the topics and target groups of my sites differ I want them to stay connected. I'll be using Wordpress as my CMS/Blog of choice, WPML for localisation (english / german) and the Wordpress 3.0 Multisite Feature to fuel all networked blogs (subdomains) with the same wordpress installation.
On my central website (name-lastname.de) I'll show excerps of my latest additions to the other sites as well as social media streams and stuff. The content of the other sites are for
potential clients/employees,
people interested in the web stuff I coded (read: scripts, css and html tricks etc.)
people I know and interact with online (more casual content)
What would be the best approach if I want those subdomains for the topics as well as different versions for english and german. I'm not sure I like the /de/ and /en/ approach but en.portfolio.name-lastname.de feels wrong too.
Should I go with language or topic as a subdomain and the other as a folder? Should I register both .de and a neutral tld (.com or .net)?
< edit >
After reading Steve H's comment, I'll put the nickname website on a seperate domain, beeing to casual for the other sites. Other then that I'll propably use a language subdirectory either with a topic subdomain or topic subdirectory.
< /edit >
I think this is largely down to personal choice, but if I was you I would choose between either totally separate domains for each of your aspects or just have one main domain (name-lastname.de) and just use Wordpress's category's to separate each section.
In terms of tld I would go for .com if you are trying to hit an international market or just use your native tld (.de ?) if not.
I can't really see any advantage with your subdomain approach to either SEO or to the user (unless you want more separation between services, in which case new top level domains would be better), so how about:
name-lastname.de
name-lastname.de/portfolio
name-lastname.de/webdesign
name-lastname.de/nickname (if not too casual)
etc...
So really it's up to you to decide just how separate these concerns are, from your list I think 1 and 2 certainly would match as any clients would be interested in your code / portfolio but perhaps point 3 would be best served on a separate domain if this is indeed too casual / you don't want clients to make too much reference to it.
Lastly in terms of language, could you not leave this up to the user, i.e. choose either English or German as your default language, but just add a link on the page to see the 'other' language. Again I would be reluctant to make 2 versions of the same page in different languages as it would be twice as much work for you to maintain, also in Chrome for example language translation is a trivial thing.
I am using the IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit to scan over a site of mine. One of the compaints it has is that there are multiple canonical URLs for my static assets, e.g.
http://example.com links to http://example.com/styles.css
https://example.com links to https://example.com/styles.css
It is of course correct, the same file is linked differently on the secure pages. This is only happening for static resources, the actual HTML pages all have single canonical URLs.
Should I leave this as is an ignore the toolkit or is there a better arrangement. I need to consider all angles, e.g.
Performance (browser caching, server load)
SEO (duplicate content penalties)
Usability (mixed content warnings)
Thanks for your help!
You need to decide if it's better for you to receive this message from your analysis toolkit, or for your customers to be told that not all items on the page are secure.
I know what my choice would be...
I have a site who's search ranking has plumetted. It should be quite SEO friendly because its built using XHtml/CSS and has been run against the SEO toolkit.
The only thing I can think that may be annoying Google is
The keywords are the same accross the whole site rather than being page specific. (cant see why this would be a massive deal
Another URL has been set up that simply points to my site (without redirecting) (again - no big deal)
Non UK users are automatically forwaded onto the US version of the site which is a different brand. I guess this could be the problem. If google spiders my site from the US then it will never get the UK version
So the question is, does geo redirecting setting effect my SEO? Is it possible to detect if who is accessing your site is actually a search engine that is spidering my site. In this case I don't want to do any geo-location
Do not use same keywords on entire site. Try to use specific keywords per page.
Do not let several URL:s point directly to the same site since this will cause the inlinks from the different domains to be treated as to different domains. If you point URLs by redirect, all inlinks will be added to the target domain and thus increase it's "inlink score".
To detect is request is from a crawler, use the browsercaps project: http://owenbrady.net/browsercaps/
Is it advisable to implement url routing for an asp.net(webforms) website which is one year old... What are the factors to be considered before implementing....
Edit:
It is a web based product website developed my company and users should pay for using it...
Some of the factors I can think of from top of my head:
Does your boss/sponsor/client/guy-who-pays-the-bill understand the importance & wants it done?
How large is the user base? If it is a internal site with few users, it might not be a big deal to ask them to update their links, but for a large public facing site, it might not be so simple as the users might have many bookmarks etc. to the content
What kind of site is it? If it is like a news site, I think people visit it for the new content rather than very old articles, but it if a knowledge base of some kind (read MSDN-like) you can expect people to have a lot of bookmarks etc. to keep handy.
Is the site SEO'd & how important is not loosing the traffic to the site based on the old URL?
What is the plan to ensure that web search engines re-index your site pages & the old URL's are given a permanent move?
There is a great advantage in having a good simple URL, but are your users tech-savvy to use it or is it just a "next-shiny-thing" initiative pushed by the developers?
HTH.
User friendly urls will improve you site from the SEO point of view. If your site is public and present in search engines will be benefited with this change.
I have to disagree with Sunny in relation with old urls. It's not true that users won't be able to access to old urls, normally, you can create redirect rules to send user hitting the previous format to the new one.
So reasons I would evaluate are:
- How important is to improve the site from SEO point if view
- If old urls can be translated to new url format through redirect rules and the importance to this.