One site, one location, multiple languages - best approach?

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey folks,

Has anyone created a multilingual site targeted at a single location? I have a site that I need to create which is targeting users in Spain. There are going to need to be English and Spanish versions of the text.

My thoughts would be to handle it this way:

1. Geolocate the entire site to spain

2. Have the english content in a folder /en/

3. Have the spanish content in a folder /es/

As far as I am aware the same content in another language is not considered duplicate content and Google should handle folks searching in spanish or english and show them the correct landing page.

Sounds easy enough in principle but I also have these other options to seemingly solidify the approach:

4. Add: rel="alternate" hreflang="x" (3)

5. Add language information to a sitemap (4)

Again, none of that seems terribly difficult but would welcome any feedback and particularly experience of multilingual sites targeting a single location.

Thanks all

Marcus

References and info

1. Multi Regional:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2010/03/working-with-multi-regional-websites.html

2. Multi Language:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2008/08/how-to-start-multilingual-site.html

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

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

[mememax]

Hi Marcus, your approach is very solid, the hreflang and the language information in sitemaps solidifies the /en/ and /es/ folders. Google is smart enough to recognize such different languages but you'll do a well job if you add those tags too.

You can also consider to add a parameter instead of a folder and then specify in GWT what is the functionality of that parameter.

[gfiorelli1]

Please explain better the "parameter" thing.

Said that, I would prefer using the subfolder option, which is the cleaner one.

[gfiorelli1]

Hola Marcus,

everything is correct in your approach.

The only thing you didn't tell is if you are going to use an .es domain or a generic one.

Saying because a .es domain name would automatically target Spain as main country (so, no need to geotarget yourself the site on GWT).

Yes, when content is in two languages, you don't fall - quite obviously - into the duplicated content issue. Said that, it is better implementing the hreflang in order to present the correct es or en URLs to the users depending on the language set in their browsers.

Note that doing so you will target differently all the the searches done in Spanish and in English, let's say, for instance, that you will "optimized" also for searches done in Spanish from Argentina.

Hence, if you are only interested in Spain for whatever reason, than the hreflang should be set es "ES-es" and "ES-en" (Spain-Spanish and Spain-English).

Finally, you can use hreflang or with the code solution or with the sitemaps solution. Using both is redundant.

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey, thanks.

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey Gianluca

The site is going to be on an .es domain and it is for a small local business that serves Spanish and English speakers (ex pats).

This is really useful though:

"Hence, if you are only interested in Spain for whatever reason, than the hreflang should be set es "ES-es" and "ES-en" (Spain-Spanish and Spain-English)."

Thanks again for the input, I actually read one of your posts on here when I was gearing up to figure out the best way to do this - for anyone else interested this is a great read:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-dropping-the-information-dust

Thanks for the input all.

Marcus

[gfiorelli1]

You're welcome Marcus