Webmaster Central Blog
Official news on crawling and indexing sites for the Google index
How to start a multilingual site
czwartek, sierpnia 07, 2008
Have you ever thought of creating one or several sites in different languages? Let's say you want to start a travel site about backpacking in Europe, and you want to offer your content to English, German, and Spanish speakers. You'll want to keep in mind factors like site structure, geographic as well as language targeting, and content organization.
Site structure
The first thing you'll want to consider is if it makes sense for you to buy country-specific top-level domains (TLD) for all the countries you plan to serve. So your domains might be ilovebackpacking.co.uk, ichlieberucksackreisen.de, and irdemochilero.es.es. This option is beneficial if you want to target the countries that each TLD is associated with, a method known as geo targeting. Note that this is different from language targeting, which we will get into a little more later. Let's say your German content is specifically for users from Germany and not as relevant for German-speaking users in Austria or Switzerland. In this case, you'd want to register a domain on the
.de
TLD. German users will identify your site as a local one they are more likely to trust. On the other hand, it can be pretty expensive to buy domains on the country-specific TLDs, and it's more of a pain to update and maintain multiple domains. So if your time and resources are limited, consider buying one non-country-specific domain, which hosts all the different versions of your website. In this case, we recommend either of these two options:
Put the content of every language in a different subdomain. For our example, you would have
en.example.com
,
de.example.com
, and
es.example.com
.
Put the content of every language in a different subdirectory. This is easier to handle when updating and maintaining your site. For our example, you would have
example.com/en/
,
example.com/de/
, and
example.com/es/
.
Matt Cutts wrote a substantial post on
subdirectories and subdomains
, which may help you decide which option to go with.
Geographic targeting vs. Language targeting
As mentioned above, if your content is especially targeted towards a particular region in the world, you can use the
Set Geographic Target tool in Webmaster Tools
. It allows you to set different geographic targets for different subdirectories or subdomains (e.g.,
/de/
for Germany).
If you want to reach all speakers of a particular language around the world, you probably don't want to limit yourself to a specific geographic location. This is known as language targeting, and in this case, you don't want to use the geographic target tool.
Content organization
The same content in different languages is not considered duplicate content. Just make sure you keep things organized. If you follow one of the site structure recommendations mentioned above, this should be pretty straightforward. Avoid mixing languages on each page, as this may confuse Googlebot as well as your users. Keep navigation and content in the same language on each page.
If you want to check how many of your pages are recognized in a certain language, you can perform a language-specific site search. For example, if you go to
google.de
and do a site search on google.com, choose the option below the search box to only display German results.
If you have more questions on this topic, you can join our
Webmaster Help Group
to get more advice.
Posted by Charlene Perez and Juliane Stiller, Search Quality Team
Hey!
Check here if your site is mobile-friendly.
Etykiety
accessibility
10
advanced
195
AMP
13
Android
2
API
7
apps
7
autocomplete
2
beginner
173
CAPTCHA
1
Chrome
2
cms
1
crawling and indexing
158
encryption
3
events
51
feedback and communication
83
forums
5
general tips
90
geotargeting
1
Google Assistant
3
Google I/O
3
Google Images
3
Google News
2
hacked sites
12
hangout
2
hreflang
3
https
5
images
12
intermediate
205
interstitials
1
javascript
8
job search
2
localization
21
malware
6
mobile
63
mobile-friendly
14
nohacked
1
performance
17
product expert
1
product experts
2
products and services
63
questions
3
ranking
1
recipes
1
rendering
2
Responsive Web Design
3
rich cards
7
rich results
10
search console
35
search for beginners
1
search queries
7
search results
140
security
12
seo
3
sitemaps
46
speed
6
structured data
33
summit
1
TLDs
1
url removals
1
UX
3
verification
8
video
6
webmaster community
24
webmaster forum
1
webmaster guidelines
57
webmaster tools
177
webmasters
3
youtube channel
6
Archive
2020
lis
paź
wrz
sie
lip
cze
maj
kwi
mar
lut
sty
2019
gru
lis
paź
wrz
sie
lip
cze
maj
kwi
mar
lut
sty
2018
gru
lis
paź
wrz
sie
lip
cze
maj
kwi
mar
lut
sty
2017
gru
lis
paź
wrz
sie
cze
maj
kwi
mar
lut
sty
2016
gru
lis
paź
wrz
sie
cze
maj
kwi
mar
sty
2015
gru
lis
paź
wrz
sie
lip
maj
kwi
mar
lut
sty
2014
gru
lis
paź
wrz
sie
lip
cze
maj
kwi
mar
lut
sty
2013
gru
lis
paź
wrz
sie
lip
cze
maj
kwi
mar
lut
sty
2012
gru
lis
paź
wrz
sie
lip
cze
maj
kwi
mar
lut
sty
2011
gru
lis
paź
wrz
sie
lip
cze
maj
kwi
mar
lut
sty
2010
gru
lis
paź
wrz
sie
lip
cze
maj
kwi
mar
lut
sty
2009
gru
lis
paź
wrz
sie
lip
cze
maj
kwi
mar
lut
sty
2008
gru
lis
paź
wrz
sie
lip
cze
maj
kwi
mar
lut
sty
2007
gru
lis
paź
wrz
sie
lip
cze
maj
kwi
mar
lut
sty
2006
gru
lis
paź
wrz
sie
Feed
Follow @googlewmc
Give us feedback in our
Product Forums
.
Subscribe via email
Enter your email address:
Delivered by
FeedBurner
