Will creating sub folders for foreign versions of the website, remove rank juice from the main site?

[Quime]

Hi,

We plan to create sub-folders for our german, spanish and italian language versions. If we do will this pass rank juice to the new sites, but at the same time badly effect our main site, regards link juice/serp?

Or is this not such a huge factor in people's experience?

Many thanks.

James.

[riyas_]

Hi James

Hope you are planing to target users for different languages or countries. You can achieve this by adding rel="alternate" hreflang="x" annotations in sitemap

Using rel="alternate" hreflang="x"

Using rel="alternate" hreflang="x" anotations in sitemap to tell Google that there is different versions of same website exist on the web. Otherwise Google will consider it as duplicate content  and block it from SERP

Example Steps

• For your German version of your website create a sub-folder like www.example.com/de/

_- Now you need to create a XML sitemap for this and you can name it as _languages.xml

_- Upload the sitemap and tell Google where it is located _through Google Web Master Tools

Useful links for this process

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2620865

Google Search Language Codes

Hope this will help you

[Quime]

That was very helpful, thanks a lot, i did not realise there was a sitemap annotation available, so I just need to add the code indicating each different version + href lang to each language pages' site map?

[riyas_]

Create all the language lines in a single XML file. Don't create multiple XML files for this. And follow the same instructions mentioned in the above Google link

[simon_realbuzz]

As far as I'm aware James, using sub-folders will mean that authority is passed to your domain as a whole but you will still need to build authority separately for each of your subfolders for them to rank in each country SERPs that you have targeted in webmaster tools and using the hreflang tag.

[Quime]

Do I need to create a new <loc>for each separate page (eg www.example/de and example/de/2ndpage) or just for each separate URL or Folder?</loc>

[riyas_]

No. We are just telling the search engine that the German version of the website (www.example.com) is located at www.example.com/de/

So all the pages/folders originating from that directory become the part of this process. (www.example.com/de/2ndpage OR www.example.com/de/another-page.html )