Best practice for Spanish version of English website?

[realpatients]

I'm doing an audit for a site that has all of its English pages under the same roof with Spanish pages in Wordpress.

It is intended for Chicago, not Mexico.

I suspect this is not a good thing, but I only have instinct to rely on here.

What is the best practice for having the same website in two languages?

http://www.enhancedform.com/ and http://www.enhancedform.com/spanish/

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi Eva

Check out hreflang attributes. This should help you out! Here's another resource from Search Engine Watch.

Let me know if you have any questions or comments! Good luck!

[DirkC]

Hi Eva,

The setup you describe is quite a standard approach in countries with multiple languages - and should work just fine, even without the hreflang attributes. Check this article from https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en. I live in Belgium - as we have 3 languages most sites have this configuration. On first visit -the user is offered a choice of preferred language, which is stored in a cookie. On subsequent visits - based on his previous choice the user is than redirected to the chosen language version

Adding the hreflang can help, but can also introduce new problems  - you can check here how to avoid them -http://moz.com/blog/hreflang-behaviour-insights

Hope this helps,

Dirk

[gfiorelli1]

Hi Eva,

your case is quite similar to the Belgium one described in a answer here above.

Said that I did not see anyone pointing you to some important thing that you're maybe forgetting to do.

Your site is a .com, a generic domain name. Generic domain names target the world by default, and that is why you have a lot of visit from Mexico for your Spanish version of the site.

Therefore, what I'd suggest you to do this check:

1. Go to Google Webmaster Tools;
2. Go to: Search Traffic > International Targeting
3. Click on the "Country" tab
4. Control if the site is targeting the USA. If not, target users in United States.

Doing that, you are telling Google that your site is meant for users in the United States and not in others countries, so it won't have that much visibility in regional Googles like google.com.mx.

Then, as suggested by others here, implement the hreflang annotations (read the resources linked in the other answers).

In the specific case of the home pages (yes, both: English version and Spanish version), the annotation will be these:

These hreflang are telling Google:

1. This URL must be presented to all people using Spanish in the USA;

2. This other URL must be presented to all people using English in the USA.