E-Commerce Multilanguage - Better on Subdomains?

[bjs2010]

Hi,

We have an e-commerce store in English and Spanish - same products. URLs differ like this:

ENGLISH:
www.mydomain.com/en/manufacturer-sku-productnameinenglish.html

SPANISH:
www.mydomain.com/es/manufacturer-sku-productnameinspanish.html

All content on pages is translated, e.g, H1, Titles, keywords, descriptions and site content itself is in the language displayed.

Is there a risk of similar or near dupe content here in the eyes of the big G?

Would it be worth implementing different languages on subdomains or completely different domains?

thank you

B

[TomRayner]

Hey B

That setup will be fine - using sub-folders or sub-domains is a fine way of serving different language content.

If everything is translated as you say, there won't be any risk of duplicate content coming from the translations.

The only potential risk of dupe content would be if the product pages are "thin" on content.  That is to say, if there is not enough content on the page, Google might think all of the pages look the same.

Run the website through SEO-Browser and look at how the page appears to the Google bot.  Once the bot has seen all of the site navigation and the footer, is there enough on the product pages to differentiate themselves from the other.  If there isn't, add more content - such as extra bits of product descriptions or reviews.

Hope this helps.

[bjs2010]

Hi Tom.

Thank you for your answer - Sounds good, so as far as your answer goes, using sub-folders is similar in seo value as subdomains?

Thanks again

[TomRayner]

That's exactly right.  In fact, a couple of years ago many SEO's believed that sub folders would have more SEO value than subdomains, as it would ensure that all of the SEO "strength", as it were, would pass to the root domain.

We've moved away from this now as people have tested subdomains and found that the strength passes equally to them as well.  Whether you go with subdomains or sub-folders, either way the SEO value will pass.