Wordpress Blog in 2 languages. How to SEO or structure it?

[WayneRooney]

Hi Moz community,

I have got a wordpress blog currently in the spanish language. I want to create the same blog content but in english version. (manually translate it to english instead of using translation service such as Google Translate). How should i structure the blog for SEO? How will it work? Any structure markups i should know about?

Any examples?

Thanks

[VicMarcusNWI]

Hi, Edmond,

Is it just the blog content you’re looking to translate or the entire site?

If it’s the entire site, you may consider putting all of your English content under a /en/ subdirectory. For example: http://yoursite.com/en/englishcontentgoeshere.

As far as the blog by itself goes, I think you would be able to employ the same structure.

Alternatively, you may consider putting all of the English content under a Category called “Content in English” or something similar. This is probably the simplest approach.

One important thing to consider is your target market. Are you targeting English-speaking audience in U.S. or in other countries? Where is your Spanish-speaking site based at and who is your target audience? You will need to plan for that and localize accordingly.

Vic

[RobCairns88]

Hey Edmond,

Vic already answered with most of what I was going to say - a big thing to remember is the issue of duplicate content if you are making a direct translation. You probably want to keep all content under the same domain for potential future link-building efforts. Using the /en approach Vic suggested will help with this.

Bear in mind, however, that such an approach can result in duplicate content penalties (see: Panda) if you are not careful with the translation process. It might be better to paraphrase your content when translating it in order to avoid these penalties.

The rest depends on what aspects of the site you want to translate, where your markets are and what language your potential customers are likely to speak.

Feel free to touch base with any questions,

Rob

[WayneRooney]

Can you elaborate on the duplicate content issue? Both are same content but in different languages.

I am thinking of

example.com/blog/en/urlgoeshere and example.com/blog/bm/urlgoeshere

What else should i be worried about?

Thanks

[gfiorelli1]

Hola,

I assume your blog is a wordpress.org and not a wordpress.com one.

If so, install the WPML plugin, which (copying and pasting from its website) l_ets you do SEO for each language separately. You can set SEO attributes for the homepage, internal pages and categories for each language. Translations appear in their unique URLs and you can even put different languages in completely different domains. WPML follows Google Webmasters’ specifications for multilingual sites to the letter, letting your sites rank high on local search results. Of course, WPML is fully compatible with SEO plugins._

It will create a /en/ subfolder for the language you're translating your blog to, which seems to be your preferred solution (in other cases, i.e. a WooCommerce based on WP, it may be better using the domain option WPML offers too).

With WPML you will be able to translate everything, not just your posts (template, plugins et al).

The URL structure will mirror the main language one, but translated to English. So if you have something like www.myblog.com/seo/como-hacer-link-building, the English version will be: www.myblog.com/en/seo/how-to-do-link-building.

It also automatically implement the hreflang annotations (so you don't have to think about them).

It is compatible with WordPress SEO by Yoast, so every translated page/post can be finely optimized.

Honestly, even though the answer here above are correct (apart the "English post" category one, which is not really the ideal solution), I warmly suggest you to use WPML.

[kwoolf]

Just food for thought, another option is to host a Wordpress multi-site or even two separate versions of Wordpress, one for each language. I find this less complicated when it comes to plugin and template compatibility, plus you can control access a bit better.

Avoid using Javascript to translate text.

Avoid putting content in multiple languages on a single page.

Do link each page in one language to the translated page to avoid 404 errors. If your language selector automatically directs users from an www.site.com/en to www.site.com/es domain, make sure your URLs for translated pages match or you'll get a lot of 404 errors. This will hurt you a great deal.