Internationalization and SEO

[Amjath]

Hi Everyone,

This is my first post in this new Q & A section!! This interface looks great!!

Now onto the question....

We have www.example.com in English that has 50,000+ URLs. We are in the process of building a new site example.de targeting German users.

The German site (www.example.de) will be a mirror of the English site at launch as we want to give a full experience to people visiting the .de domain. However, not all pages will be localized as we can't support that. We are planning on localizing the core sets of pages (~500) and leaving the rest in English. Post launch, we will have additional milestones to localize the remaining pages until the entire site is localized (converted to German).

Is this the correct way to go? Will this cause duplicate content issue?
Will adding "rel=canonical" tag on these pages solve the purpose?

Thanks for the help!

[Dan-Petrovic]

I can tell you exactly what happened to one of our client's websites. We went into a similar debate over a .de and .com domain and as a result of inability to come to an agreement (between SEO and developers) both were released with no canonical handling whatsoever.

The outcome was good, perhaps due to a bit of luck. What happened was that Google figured out that this was another geographic region site and allowed for both pages to be indexed, cached and found in results (one for google.de and the other for google.com.au / google.com). So when I searched for the same sentence in "quotes" it would bring up both results without omitting.

If I can make an educated guess, it would be a mix of geo location (contact details, tld) and the fact that layout added a substatntial amount of difference to both sites (as one layout header, nav, sidebars and fotter were in german and other in english).

In what timeframe are you looking to add german translation to your pages?

[Francisco_Meza]

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/03/working-with-multi-regional-websites.html

Read the part:

Dealing with duplicate content on global websites

Also watch this video

watch?v=r9r3payqazm

[Amjath]

Hi Dejan,

This is very helpful!! Thank you so much for discussing real life case study.

We are planning to launch .de site (with 500 pages in German and rest in English) in July 2011.

Then over a course of 12 -18 months after that, we will have everything translated in German.

[Amjath]

Hi franciscocmeza

Thanks for the reply. Yes, I had read Google guidelines and scoured Google webmaster central before posting the question here. rel=canonical solution was mentioned in Google guidelines.

I am not able to see the video. YouTube says it's not available. Can you please resend the video link?

[Dan-Petrovic]

You're welcome. If the .de site hasn't been online until now then it will be some time before you will earn Google's full trust of course. One thing we've noticed was that websites with higher pagerank / links / trust / authority get indexed more thoroughly (deeper, wider...etc) so enabling for a nice natural link growth would be important in the early days of the site if all that content is going to be indexed by Google. Remember that Google's pagerank is more or less invisible to webmasters these days and when it does update it's really stale as far as data goes. So don't obsess over a toolbar pagerank and think about ideal places to score a great, authoritative link from.

Best of luck with your site release!

[jaraca]

Thanks for the comments. They have been very useful