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I have a multilingual site with the same content in different languages with descriptive seo urls incorporating the title of each pages article. To switch between said languages of translated articles I have an action which looks up the translated title using the previous language and redirects to it. This all works fine except I noticed, despite there being no view, google has indexed said redirect urls.

Is this bad practice? I don't want to 301 redirect as it seems having links on every page to 301 redirects is a really bad idea. Do I somehow include a meta tag or is there some other approach?

The reason I currently have this is I want each article page to link to all of its translations using flags at the top of each page. The more I think about it I should just generate the direct url as this itself may have seo benefits. The reason I didn't go down this path originally was page rendering speed. I'd have to look up multiple articles solely for their url slug and expire caches of all languages upon any title change (it's a wiki style user generated content). Also, in some cases a translation wouldn't exist in which case I would need to link instead, say, to the category of article with a flash message.

So thinking through this while writing maybe this seems the preferable if more difficult to implement solution?

mark
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2 Answers2

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I have an app that I'm building that supports ten languages: English, simplified and traditional Chinese, French, Spanish, Russian, Japanese, German, and Hindi.

I tried a number of things but what I ended up doing was making :en default and then switching by where the request was coming from and then when uses signup they can set a default language. So if it was coming from mainland China I use :scn, and if it comes from Hong Kong I use :tcn traditional Chinese/simplified Chinese.

This way the application maintains a state of a language and there is no redirection.

I think any redirection is going to be troublesome so I wouldn't do that. Also, I am working on a dynamic site map that will list all of the links to google, which will have 10 different translations per 'page'.

I haven't deployed my application yet so I cannot check the Chinese search engines etc... to see if they are indexing my content.

thenengah
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  • Hi Sam and thanks for your answer. It's not really the initial language to display that is my problem. I've added to my question to better explain. – mark Dec 23 '10 at 20:27
  • In that case you could add a permalink for each translation. You probably have a title in each language that you can use as the permalink and if a use clicks on one of those languages they will be clicking on that permalink. – thenengah Dec 23 '10 at 20:30
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Hey Mark, from a search engine perspective you definitely don't want to rely on redirects everywhere, if for nothing other than performance. Search engines allocate a certain amount of bandwidth to each site based on ranking, if you're redirecting every page, you're eating up more of that bandwidth than you need to, and potentially not getting as much content crawled as you could otherwise.

Your second solution of generating the localized URLs and sticking them at the top of the page is the best option for search engines. That will give a unique URL for each page, and will provide a direct link to each page that Google and Bing (e.g. Yahoo) can follow and index.

I provided a set of best practices for SEO & Localized sites on another stackoverflow Q&A, here's a link, I think you'll find it valuable too: Internationalization and Search Engine Optimization

Good luck!

Community
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Nathan Buggia
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  • Hi Nathan and thanks for your reply. This seems absolutely what I should do, link directly to the translation. What do you think though of the latter part of the question; would linking to the category of an article in the case of it not being translated hurt seo due to its inconsistency? – mark Dec 27 '10 at 13:28
  • Putting my search engine representative hat on here, I would ask you if this would be of any value to actual users on your website. If the answer is yes, then go ahead and add those links, but they probably won't make a huge difference from an SEO standpoint. At this point it comes down to opportunity cost as to what else you could be doing on your site. For example, do you have a sitemap? How well is it structured? Did you partition it so that you can do crawl analysis on it in Google's webmaster tools? – Nathan Buggia Dec 27 '10 at 19:41
  • Hi Nathan. Sorry, didn't receive notification of your comment. Thing about linking to categories of non-existant articles is these links between languages are flags at the top of the page representing not just the languages available of an individual article but also represent the multilingual site as a whole. I think what I'm going to do is not have said links and maybe in the near future have a 'crossed out' flag kinda thing. Thanks again for your help, I'm now going to read about partitioned sitemaps which I previously had not heard of. – mark Dec 31 '10 at 13:24