Multi-lingual Site (Tags & XML SiteMap Question)

[CeeC-Blogger]

We have two sites that target users in two different countries in different languages in the following manner:

Site 1

es.site1.com - Spanish version

Site 2

site2.com/francais/..............

Navigation and content are translated into the foreign language from English

What is the best way to let Google know about these multi-lingual pages:

A. Add the rel="alternate" and hreflang= in the source code for the hunders of pages we have.

B. Or is there a tool we can use to crawl and create XML site maps for different language pages. What do we need to do in the XML site map so that Google know that sitemap1.xml for example relates to Spanish as an example

many thanks

[mememax]

Hi Hola (sorry for the redundancy ), if adding the hreflang in your headers is too tricky and slows your page you may use the tag in the xml sitemap as you correctly said. In this article you have examples on how your sitemap should look like to have google fully understand it. You have to set up a standard language (in the article the base is english) and then add tags to tell google which is each language focused on. If your spanish language is focused to any spanish version you can just add es if your spanish version is focused to Spain you'll have to specify es-ES or es-MX if it's focused on mexico. Hope this helps!

[CeeC-Blogger]

Hi Mememax,

Many thanks for the response.

Just so that I am super clear, which site map producing software would you recommend where I could specify such a command to be added for a site map for a specific directory or sub-domain.

To me, the Google article seems to be suggesting that the hreflang commend needs to be added to each url in the site-map, and we have hundreds if not thousands.

Best

[mememax]

Hi, you can use xenu (which is free) or screaming frog if you have the license. They're both great crawling tools.

Then the most difficult part is the association among all the different urls of each language. If you have any pattern which may help associate those pages you're done.

Example:

EN: www.domain.com/page/node-123
ES: www.domain.com/pagina/nodo-123

etc etc.

In that sense with excel you can easily isolate the id of each page and build the xml with functions, since the XMl is pretty straightforward:

="<url><loc>"&URL&"</loc><xhtml:link < strong="">rel="alternate"** hreflang="de"****    href="""&GERMAN URL&""" />****<xhtml:link< strong=""> rel="alternate"**** hreflang="es"****    href="""&SPANISH URL&""" /></xhtml:link<></xhtml:link <>**</url>"

[Aleyda]

Hi there,

There's much more you can do:

• Link all of your language versions using a crawlable language menu. Like this Google will be able to initially crawl and index these versions.
• Create a Google Webmaster Tools profile for each one of your language versions independently, like this you will be able to generate a specific XML for each (besides tracking each one of them much more easily), and if they are not only language targeted but also, country targeted, you can also geolocate them through GWT too.
• Add to each specific XML sitemap the hreflang annotations referring to the language of each one of your websites as specified here. To help you with this you can use this MediaFlow tool.
• Add the hreflang annotations in the HTML too, in the head section of the HTML of each one of your different pages, as specified here.

The more of these you do, the easier will be for Google to identify that these new version of your sites are targeting these additional languages.

Thanks!