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SEO / Localisation question: should I translate url's?

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  • 17-12-2008 7:56pm
    #1
    frost
    Registered Users Posts: 249 ✭✭


    [edit] When I say 'node' I mean 'page'. Node is Drupal terminology!

    I'm working on a multilingual site, and want to ensure that it gets a reasonable shot at good SEO.

    From what I understand about SEO (and it's not a lot), one thing that helps a node's score for a given set of search keywords is the node's url path

    So for example, if you have two nodes:
    /horse-riding
    and
    /node/20

    And someone is searching for 'horse riding', then the fist one would score higher than the second (all other things being equal of course!)

    So the logical extension of this into other languages is that I should translate the url for each node. If you look at my site you'll see that I didn't do this, instead what I did was just prefix the same url with the language code. So using the example above, the German translation appears at /de/horse-riding

    Is this something that is worth going back and changing, and are there any other implications for doing this?
    BTW, the site is new and hasn't been fully indexed by Google yet, so it should be ok for me to change urls at this stage.

    Thanks!

    BTW If you take the time to look at the site, I'd really welcome any general comments on it: SEO, functionality, layout and design. As of today I've not really done anything on layout and design (apart from picking a Drupal theme and throwing in a few photos) so clearly that is wide open for improvment!


Comments

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    #2
    louie
    Closed Accounts Posts: 1,200 ✭✭✭louie


    Have a look into subdomains. Might be a better option.

    normal url will be http://www.website.com
    and german could be http://de.website.com or http://german.website.com

    After that a 301 redirection should help...


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    #3
    TheWaterboy
    Registered Users Posts: 379 ✭✭TheWaterboy


    Yes subdomains are the way to go firstly and then also translate your urls

    so

    http://german.website.com

    and then you can do something like

    german.website.com/page.php/german_translated_keyword

    in your urls

    Also one other thing - On your flags make sure and put the title and alt text on them as the correct language name - you have the flag of Norway with Norweigan text when it should be Norsk. Better from a language SEO point of view


  • Options
    #4
    frost
    Registered Users Posts: 249 ✭✭frost


    that's easy enough to do, but whats the advantage of using a subdomain over my (really drupal's) approach of language prefix?


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