Multilingual Structure

[ChristopherM]

Hello fellow SEO fans, I've got a setup that I'm interested in some opinions on.

I have a website which has the following setup:

www.site.com (english version of the site)

www.site.com/nl (dutch version of the site)

Now, my experience tells me the dutch version would be written in dutch (not using Google Translate) and the meta data et al should also be in dutch. But my question is:

If somebody in, say, Netherlands perform a search in english for a specific keyword, we would want the www.site.com page to appear in the SERPs, not the www.site.com/nl page, because the person has searched in english. However, because there's a www.site.com/nl page, purely the /nl page will be optimized and linked to in order to rank it higher in the SERPs for dutch searches and not english searches? But if that's the case, then the person in the Netherlands searching for the english version of the keyword, probably won't see www.site.com in the ranks because of targeting and keyword distribution?

Bit of a tricky situation that I've been pondering over and can't quite put the nail on the head.

Any assistance would be appreciated.

[Calvin5]

Don't worry that much!

Just do it as you intend and be happy!

• if the english page is with english content and english (context & anchor) backlinks it will rank for english terms
• and same for the dutch page - there is no way 100% dutch (as content and backlinks) page to rank for english search terms.

My 2 cents.

Cheers

[ChristopherM]

Unfortunately over thinking is a requirement here because the site's not ranking as it should be, and I cannot just be happy until I've made a plan unfortunately.

I appreciate your response mate, I just need someone a little more technical to assist me.

[Calvin5]

Oh I'm sorry to hear there are problems already.

I thought that you are worrying about some possible problems in the future.

Maybe it's not very clear what the current problems are, mate, and maybe that's the reason  there are no more answers with more specific information. Maybe you should be more specific about the current problems and not only about the ones which might or might not happen.

Cheers and still be happy, life is more than this.

[gfiorelli1]

In your case I would use the hreflang mark up like this:

That way you are saying to Google that whenever a search is realized in English (and independently of the country, because the code used is just the ISO language code), it must present the English home page URL.

Vice versa, if a search is done in flemish (independently of the location), it must present the Flemish home page.

This should be repeated for all the pages of the site.

[ChristopherM]

@Gianluca - Thank you very much for stepping in here, I know you're a busy man so this is appreciated. What you've suggested is definitely an option and I'll investigate that approach when I'm back in the office. Thank you kindly.