Multilingual Blog Structure

[andromedical]

Hi

I have a domain in 20 languages. I want to integrate a wordpress blog (in subfolders) in the 3 most important languages like EN-ES-FR (actually they will be 3 independent blogs) and I want to know which structure is the best one.

OPTION 1

domain/en/blog/post1

domain/es/blog/post1

domain/fr/blog/post1

OPTION 2

domain/blog_en/post1

domain/blog_es/post1

domain/blog_fr/post1

Last question. For the rest of the 17 languages of my domain, can I put a link the english blog or is not recommended because maybe too many pages will be linking to the blog?

Thank you

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Eduardo,

I would go with option 1. It is the structure most tend to use, although it is really about which makes more sense. Make use of the HREFLANG tag to add some clarification to these.

As per the last part of the the question, are you planning on using a language drop down at the top of the page or add a link from every post in every language back to the English blog?

-Andy

[andromedical]

Hi andy

I already have a drop down menu to change to any of the 20 languages. What I plan to to for the rest of 17 languages which won't have a specific blog (because I don't have 20 native speakers) is to add to the main navigation menu a direct link to the english blog home page like this:

Home | Products | About | Media | Blog | Store

Of course, as the link to the english blog will be on the main menu of each language, it will create the same amount of internal links than the number of pages per language.

is it ok?

[JaneCopland]

Hi Eduardo,

The use of the hreflang tag, also called the rel="alternate" tag, is perfect for what you are trying to do. This post talks about how the tag works and suggests various URL structures that work best.

Another good resource about the tag is here.

Regarding the links to the blog, are you saying that there will be a link to domain/de/blog/, even if you do not have a German blog, linked to from the German section of the site?

[andromedical]

I jane

Thank you for your answer. I will put the hreflang tag for each post created.

I am saying that for the german language (for which I won't have a blog in german) I will link it to the english, so to: domain/en/blog. And the same for each of the language for which I won't have a blog. For example:

domain/it/ will have a link to domain/en/blog

domain/ja/ will have a link to domain/en/blog

domain/nl/ will have a link to domain/en/blog

etc..

I am a bit afraid to do that because as I said before, among my 20 languages, only 3 languages will have their own blog while the rest of languages will link to the english blog.

I have other 17 languages on the same domain with about 190 pages / language, so if I put on the main navigation menu (header) a link to the english blog this means that I will create 3230 internal links the home page of the english blog. I don't know maybe it is too much and I should leave the rest of 17 languages without blog.

What do you think?

[JaneCopland]

Hi Eduardo,

Ah - I understand. I don't see this as being a problem - many internal links like this have many thousands of links pointing to them internally and Google understands that this is the nature of internal linking. If you crawl a few other larger sites, including this one, with a service like ScreamingFrog (you'd need the paid version to see the full site crawl), you'll see that resources like this blog are linked to thousands of times, since there are thousands of blog posts from years ago, articles, tool pages, indexed Q&A pages etc.

Cheers,

Jane

[andromedical]

Thanks a lot Jane