9 replies to this topic

[michael_ter]

Hi dear experts,

A couple of months I upgraded my old cart to a new one. When I was looking for a new cart beside all features I was thinking about SEO options such as good SEO module and multilingual support - in order to use non-English search keywords.

This new cart has SEO mod. with rewrite method, it allows to define any SEO name for each category and product (though in one language only) and to have entire control on Title, Meta etc. in all supported languages. The only problem is that language is selected in a drop-down menu so spiders can not reach pages in all languages so pages have an URL like

/category/product1.html

On other hand the the SEO module of the cart allows to form URLs for each language in a way

/en/category/product1.html
/de/category/product1.html
/fr/category/product1.html

So all pages in all languages will be visible for spiders.

Is there any difference in ranking of pages which have URLS

/category/product1.html
and
/en/category/product1.html ?

Thank you.

[Jill]

Is there any difference in ranking of pages which have URLS

/category/product1.html
and
/en/category/product1.html ?

Probably not any significant differences.

[Otaku]

There should be only one variant of URLs - either /category/* or /en/category/*, but not both. If the site will have both, SE spiders will probably consider that as duplicate content and will lower your site's rating, whatever it is...
The second variant looks pretty good so you can happily use that

And for the spiders to discover pages in other languages, you can manually add a static page with a language choice - with links to other language homepages or what you have there - in addition to the menu. You can ask some coder to help you if you can't do it yourself.

By the way, what shopping cart engine did you choose?

[Jill]

If the site will have both, SE spiders will probably consider that as duplicate content and will lower your site's rating, whatever it is...

It's doubtful that they would do that. They would most likely just filter out one set of the pages, through their duplicate content filter.

[michael_ter]

By the way, what shopping cart engine did you choose?

Thank you for your advices and, please, excuse me for being out long time.

I am using Cs-Cart - far be it from me to advertise it but after some others carts I stopped with it on some reasons. One of them - SEO ability. For an experiment I made a new site with new domain and in a month I got some sales - I used no ads, only free submissions to some engines.

Returning back to multilingual site I want to say that I use English as main language for product description, though interface is still multilingual, and I tried to make multilingual pages with category descriptions, titles, metas are only for spiders. One my German customer suggested me. I asked her why there were so few German customer and she explained that beside all other reasons there was problem with language - people first search in native language. I am not sure if it may help me and if all troubles with manipulation with 6 languages may be paid off - theoretically it may lead to the site some visitors who make search in French, German etc.

There should be only one variant of URLs - either /category/* or /en/category/*, but not both.
The second variant looks pretty good so you can happily use that

The problem is that this is some months as I used /category/* version way of link writing, other language is selected dynamically but it is invisible for spiders. I am not sure if I should use /en/category/* way (I suppose I could 301 redirect all pages - more than thousand, should I do it manually?) as I am not sure if this my idea may increase somehow search results.


What do you think about it?

Edited by michael_ter, 23 February 2008 - 07:46 PM.

[Randy]

If I'm understanding you correctly, you have an English version at /category/* and also at /en/category/*. Is this correct?

If it were me I'd simply exclude one of those via robots.txt and then be very careful how my internal linking was structured. Meaning I'd want all of my internal links pointing at the same version the spiders were being allowed to index. A 301 redirect shouldn't be necessary unless and until there are lots of links pointing at the "wrong" url version.

[michael_ter]

If I'm understanding you correctly, you have an English version at /category/* and also at /en/category/*. Is this correct?.

Thank you. Sorry for confusing. No, there are two ways of forming links, only one of each in the same time

1. /category/*.html (in other languages it will look like /category/*.html&sl=FR etc.)

2. /en/category/*
   /fr/category/*
   etc.

At present my site has links like /category/* and, to be honest, whould not like to have one more directory level like /en/ though, as it was explained here, for spiders it is not a problem.

My task is to go from /category/* to /en/category/* mode.

[michael_ter]

In general my quiestion transformed into other one. Is there any sence to add more languages in order to improve search results in international SE (like Google German, French etc.)?

I

[Randy]

Is there any sence to add more languages in order to improve search results in international SE (like Google German, French etc.)?

It depends. Upon several things.

I'm going to assume since you're asking about a shopping cart that we're talking about tangible goods and not services. So your first things to determine are if what you sell is legal in those countries (you'd be surprised!), if there are any import restrictions (are either you or the customer going to be expected to pay Duty or Import Taxes?) and whether the products are already available in each target country by another distributor. Then you'd got to decide if you can compete on price, because of someone can get it locally often your very real shipping costs may knock you out of the running.

Then once you've figured out if it's legel and you can be competitive in your pricing you'll need to figure out if there's actually a market in the country for what you're selling. There are often all sorts of cultural norms which are not at first apparent.

You have to do all of the above for each country you're thinking about entering. Then once you've decided there's a market for your products in Country X and you can compete you need to decide if it's worth your while to have at least one or two people on staff who Speak The Language. Why? Because first you do not want to use some automatic translation service to convert your web pages into another language. Automatic translation services just don't work well enough. You need someone who speaks and writes the language. You also need one or two people on staff who can answer questions (via email and phone potentially) in the customers native language. This of course could affect whether you can compete on price since your staff costs may well increase.

If all of the above still says you're good to go, then and only then is it time to start figuring out how to set up your site for multiple languages. As you can see, there are lots of steps before you get to the easy part.

[michael_ter]

Dear Randy,

Thank you for your detailed answer - it does clears not only SEO related points. As a matter of fact my customers at the English site are from different countries though main part from English speaking countries. So I thought that more languages could:
1. Help to make purchase to non-English speaking customers
2. Increase traffic from international search engines

But it turns out that this more complicate than just to translate the site! Qualified staff may cost more than profit from additional customers. Thank you again.