Webmasters Stack Exchange
Webmasters Stack Exchange

Questions tagged [internationalization]

Internationalization is the process of designing and implementing a website with flexibility in how it handles language, text, number formatting, and other details that differ by culture. This makes it cheaper and easier to localize a website to different languages and cultures later.

249 questions
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How should I structure my URLs for both SEO and localization?

When I set up a site in multiple languages, how should I set up my URLs for search engines and usability? Let's say my site is www.example.com, and I'm translating into French and Spanish. What is best for usability and SEO? Directory…
artlung
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SEO International Websites usage of sub domains and ccTLD domains

Is it better to have separate country specific domains (which costs more money) or sub domains which define the country, for better SEO? e.g. example.com example.com.au example.co.uk vs example.com au.example.com uk.example.com Assumption: The…
Pure.Krome
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2 answers

International Targeting "no return tags"

Google Webmaster Tools has added an International Targeting Report to show hreflang errors. There's a section that reports "no return tags" errors with Originating URL & Alternate URL columns. What do I need to do to fix these errors? Is there a…
Andrew Lott
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2 answers

What countries require a state/province in the mailing address?

I'm creating a form and want to require / hide the state/province field based on the selected country. What countries require a state in the mailing address? For example, the United States does.
hookedonwinter
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12
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1 answer

link rel="alternate", multiple languages and canonical urls

Context: We've got a website which is available in multiple language versions. However, the content is the same. Each translated version of the site is available on a distinct subdomain. On some pages, we use to point to…
Malax
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11
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3 answers

language+region value of the HTML5 lang attribute

I'm working on a website which will offer localized content following the language+region approach as described on this W3.org page (e.g. fr-CA for Canadian French content, and fr-FR for "French French" content). As we consider content for each…
Max Corbeau
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10
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1 answer

Is using optional URL segments bad for SEO?

I have a multilanguage site with urls like this https://example.org/en/ads/2 https://example.org/es/ads/2 https://example.org/it/ads/2 which serve the site in different languages. My site also accepts URLs like this https://example.org/ads/2 In…
deivid
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3 answers

How to tell Google that each subfolder is a different site? Otherwise, Google appends the main site's name to every other subfolder

One of our Korean clients (who would like to remain unamed) has a problem with their section of their website (subfolder). They are part of an international organization. Let's call them "Foobar" for our purposes. The setup www.foobar.com (redirects…
Joseph Shih
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7
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3 answers

Redirect based on country

Let's say I have a site that has multiple versions for different countries, e.g.: www.example.com/us www.example.com/uk www.example.com/ca and I want to use IP geolocation to redirect users who go to www.example.com to the appropriate country…
Eric Petroelje
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3 answers

How to deal with yet-to-be-translated, placeholder content on a multi-language site?

I'm working on a site where we have many different languages (about 24). When a content piece is authored in English, it is automatically copied to all language sites where it will be later translated to the proper language. Currently, we're using…
phatskat
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7
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4 answers

SEO consequences for merging country sites in a .com

I am in the process of refactoring a number of rental portals I've built for a company with locations in Austria, Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. Instead of the current setting of each country site running under its own domain…
Pekka
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2 answers

Is having a landing page for multi-country websites detrimental for search engine ranking?

I have a multi-language / multi-country website which uses a single domain name. The url structure is as follows: country-name.example.com/language/ Ex: ca.example.com/en/ ca.example.com/fr/ uk.example.com/en/ Whenever a user enters example.com, I…
KEOKI
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3 answers

Hreflang for regions (like states and provinces) within a country

I'm working on a website which has different content depending on the province/state the user is from. Is it valid to add the subdivision code to the hreflang like below?
Brad Thiessen
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7
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2 answers

How to make sure Chinese text is rendered in webpage?

I'm making a webpage that's partly in Chinese. I use the UTF-8 encoding for all text. The page contains some parts that are in Chinese, mixed with western letters. The font I use for western text doesn't have Chinese characters in it, so I want the…
PetaspeedBeaver
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3 answers

How to handle SEO for brand that has a special character in the name

I am building a website (small online retail store) for a company whose brand name has a special character in it. The name of the brand is actually a legitimate Polish word that has an Ł, which is an L with stroke. The problem is that this company…
trinth
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