Best practice for URL - Language/country

Kilgray

Hi,

We are planning on having our website localized into more languages. We already have an English and German version. The German version is currently a sub-domain:

www.example.com --> English version

de.example.com --> German version

Is this recommended? Or is it always better to have URLs with language prefixes such a:

www.example.com/de

www.example.com/es

Which is a better practice in terms of SEO?

TomRayner

Hi Peter

Both are viable options.

I'd highly recommend going through Aleyda Solis' international SEO posts here on the Moz blog. They can teach how to prepare for international SEO, how to approach site structure and how to generate relevant code and hreflang tags.

Here is her international SEO checklist

Here is her Hreflang blog post and generator tool

And 40 tools to help advance your international SEO

They're great reading and nothing that I'd be able to do add to, so I hope this helps!

BlueprintMarketing

I think that Tom gave you one of the best answers possible.

However I hope this helps your site structure should be very similar to one contained in the two URL's

If I may add a little bit of information that I thought was helpful

WHERE TO ADD YOUR HREFLANG TAGS

You can add hreflang tags to your sitemaps, in the HTTP response headers, or on the page itself.

IN YOUR SITEMAPS

The best place to add hreflang is in your sitemap as including them in the headers or on the page adds weight to every single page request.

The following example will inform Google about the English version from the German version of the website:

<url> <loc>http://www.example.com/deutsch/</loc></url>

<xhtml:link< span=""> rel=”alternate” hreflang=”en” href=”http://www.example.com/english/” /> <xhtml:link < span="">rel=”alternate” hreflang=”de” href=”http://www.example.com/deutsch/” /></xhtml:link <></xhtml:link<>

This method would need to be repeated in full for every page on the site and for all the international websites.

IN YOUR HEADERS AND HTML

Hreflang tags can also be added to the HTTP header:

Link: http://www.example.com/english/; rel=”alternate”; hreflang=”en” Link: http://www.example.com/deutsch/; rel=”alternate”; hreflang=”de”

Or in the tag in the HTML:

http://www.example.com/english/” /> http://www.example.com/deutsch/

& because you will be creating a new site

https://www.candidsky.com/blog/the-seo-2015-guide-to-website-migration/

it would come down to your backlink profile if it were me I would use

Moz open site Explorer, Majestic, Ahrefs and Google Webmaster tools to determine whether or not I will be receiving a enough Backlinks for a subdomain or separate TLD otherwise I would use a subfolder and an extremely fast method of hosting the site Fastly is excellent or many other great methods as well.

Hope this helps,

Tom

PS use

http://hreflang.ninja/ to check

Daniel_Morgan

Hi Peter,

Both really good answers to your questions above but maybe it would be good to give you some further pointing in the right direction. Perhaps you could answer the questions below and I can give you my personal opinion on which method would be best:

will you be putting an equal amount of marketing (content, PR, etc.) into the Spanish version for example compared with English?
are you able to offer fully localised service eg, Spanish customer service, Spanish sales team etc.?
is your company well-known globally?

It's important not to also forget that another option is using ccTLDs (eg, .co.uk, .com.au). These give the highest signal to search engines about the country being targeted and also importantly make you look more "local" which can do wonders for increasing conversion rate in countries where your company is not well-known.

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