Semalt Expertise: Search Engine Optimization For Multilingual E-Commerce Sites

23.05.2018

Semalt Expertise: Search Engine
Optimization For Multilingual
E-Commerce Sites

In some cases, you may nd that pages in English rank higher in Google than those in a language of the targeted
niche. This occurs since Google tries to pop out the most relevant outcome for the query, and in some situations, the
web user may not be concerned with the language at all.

During the last half a decade of working on SEO for eCommerce sites, Semalt experts realized that the majority of
people who own stores have dif culties with optimization of their sites for a myriad of languages. Translating the
site for the target language may help you somehow, however it doesn't make you ranking higher in a different
country. If decoding of your site was that vital, which optimization procedure would you adopt for America vs.
United Kingdom vs. Germany?

Max Bell, the Customer Success Manager of Semalt gives the insight on how you should evade 7 the most common
mistakes in site's multilingual optimization.

1. Translating content without changing the URL 1/3

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This is prone to occur on eCommerce sites based on Magendo, which is a popular free eCommerce platform
globally. For instance, if your store has French and English translations, the URL for each language should be
different. The same is applicable for your content pages.

2. Absence of rel="alternate" hre ang="x" tag or its wrong incorporation

Real alternate is an important tool, essential for methodical multilingual SEO. Using this tag, you can show that two
pages in different languages on your website is an original, not duplicate content, which is translated in several
versions.

3. Automatic redirection grounded on
IP/ Accommodate Language titles or
same approaches

Google advised users to avoid automatic
redirection since it may prevent web visitors from
viewing all the forms of a site. You may wonder why
Google still redirects users when they visit
google.com, but the company uses x-default
heading as an addition to real alternate.

4. Integrating rel canonical and real alternate

If you implemented rel alternate properly, evaluate your real canonical operation since it is most likely that there
might be some challenges linked to it. Avoid using canonical to identify translated versions of the site to your
evasion language.

5. Prohibiting decoded pages through robots.txt or Nonindexing

If you fail to impellent all tools at your exposure for multilingual SEO, Google insists that there is no need to cancel
the duplicates by restricting crawling in a robots.txt le.

6. Failure to cross-tie translation pages or doing the cross-linking poorly

You should use internal hyperlinks to link translational pages to ensure that that they are accessible to search
engines and users. People prefer using text links or country ags with the name of the preferred language.

7. Country subdomain vs. country folder

This mistake may not be crucial when compared to other six ones mentioned, but it is still an issue you should
resolve. You will have to decide if the translation URLs links will be in subdomains or in folders. In most situations, it
will make minimal differences to choose any of two options.

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