Multilingual blogs and site structure

[Seiyav]

Hi everyone,

I have a question about multilingual blogs and site structure.

Right now, we have the typical subfolder localization structure.

ex:

domain.com/page (english site)

domain.com/ja/page (japanese site)

However, the blog is a slightly more complicated. We'd like to have english posts available in other languages (as many of our users are bilinguals). The current structure suggests we use a typical domain.com/blog or domain.com/ja/blog format, but we have issues if a Japanese (logged in) user wants to view an English page.

domain.com/blog/article would redirect them to domain.com/ja/blog/article thus 404-ing the user if the post doesn't exist in the alternate language.

One suggestion (that I have seen on sites such as etsy/spotify is to add a /en/ to the blog area:

ex

domain.com/en/blog

domain.com/ja/blog

Would this be the correct way to avoid this issue? I know we could technically work around the 404 issue, but I don't want to create duplicate posts in /ja/ that are in English or visa versa. Would it affect the rest of the site if we use a /en/ subfolder just for the blog?

Another option is to use:

domain.com/blog/en

domain.com/blog/ja

but I'm not sure if this alternative is better.

Any help would be appreciated!

[DanielFreedman]

Very interesting. I am working on a similar issue for a client. The site, including a blog, will be available in 5 languages.

But I'm not sure I precisely understand your issue.

Are all your blog posts originally written in one language only -- and that is that  language English?

Do you ever alternate languages within a blog post?

Do you intend to have identical posts in both English and Japanese ? Or will there be some English-only posts, and some Japanese-only posts?

From you post, it sounds like you might be intending to translate some posts but not others. Why is that?

It seems to me, you have to sort through these editorial issues first before coming up with an SEO strategy.

It all comes down to who your intended audience is and how they can best be served.

[Seiyav]

Hi Daniel,

Sorry if I wasn't clear. The blog posts would usually be written in the original language. So we'll have some in English and some in Japanese. It's likely that we will translate some posts but there will be some that are too culture based to be useful in a different language. (Say a post about a Japanese holiday that might not be useful in English)

So to answer your question, there will definitely be some posts in English that are not translated into Japanese and visa versa.

[DanielFreedman]

Thanks for the clarification.

I can't really comment intelligently without knowing more about the nature of the site and the intended audience.

But may I  gently suggest you might want to think about the issue more broadly than as a technical SEO issue?

For instance, why do you assume that English readers wouldn't be interested in Japanese holidays when you also say many readers are bilingual? If you made an editorial decision to publish everything in both languages, the SEO piece would look very different.

I always advocate settling the editorial issues first, then plugging in the SEO component.