Multiple language Website SEO advice

08.27.2010 · Posted in seo

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I am just copying the whole content from WMW to start the conversation about Multiple Language website SEO. This is a tricky one, we have been work on it for last one year and have faced a lot of problems ourselves. Here is a checklist to start with, I will keep adding it here:

- all page content is translated, (except for UGC sections)
- all window s and <meta>s are translated<br /> - all pages are in UTF-8<br /> - all data is stored as UTF-8<br /> - images that have text in them are available in i18n versions<br /> - all images have @alt text and @title attributes translated<br /> - page delivers a “Content-Language” HTTP header<br /> - the <html> tag has attributes @lang and @xml:lang<br /> - dates are presented in translated formats (eg “el 4 de agosto 2010″)<br /> - outgoing emails are translated into the user’s preferred language<br /> - numbers are presented with internationalized formatting (eg. $1,234.56 vs $1.234,56)<br /> - other subtle formatting, eg. 50% vs 50 %, Name: vs Nom :</p> <p><strong>Some practical things I learned during this project:</strong><br /> - Pages that contain a lot of mixed UGC language can/should be blocked from indexes using a <meta> tag, because they can only do more harm than good<br /> - alt language pages all have unique URLs, they are not dynamically rendered using a cookie or geo-targeting<br /> - geotargeting may be useful for setting sessions but should not override URL-based navigation to another language<br /> - ccTLDs are perceptually better than subdomains or subfolders<br /> - massive cross-linking of pages is good<br /> - for storing the phrase lexicon, SQLite is faster than MySQL, XML, or even a hard-coded array, on a typical LAMP server. see: [webmasterworld.com...]<br /> - liberal use of memcache is a good thing<br /> - <a title="offering" href="http://www.jeetbo.com/offering">offering</a> translated file paths is good, if your architecture is flexible enough to do that without causing great suffering.<br /> - start every project using UTF-8 for everything. It’ll save you big headaches later on.<br /> - Translating will take longer than you expect<br /> - Not all translators are comfortable with internet jargon like “download” and “ringtone” and “widget” etc. You may need to shop around for someone specialized… or pretty much anyone under 25. LOL<br /> - Store verbal metadata (name, description, tags) in a separate table from non-verbal metadata (price, popularity), keyed with a language code (“en”, “es”, “fr”…), with a one-to-many relationship with the item ID. That way you can offer verbal metadata in more than one language without rewriting all your SQL queries. (I had to do that. Not fun.)<br /> - May be worthwhile to hire folks who read/write the other languages to do some blitzkrieg link-building<br /> - In some situations a templating language like Smarty comes in handy</p> <p><strong>Some of the debate is still on:</strong><br /> >Translating will take longer than you expect<br /> Absolutely – and you should use local people if you’re really serious. Stay AWAY – far AWAY – from automated services. 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