Change Lang. IP base, Browser Base or Manually?
-
Hello
I would like to ask a question about multi lang/international Website. Which one is better for SEO?
User in Different Countries automatically see The website in their Language?
or
User see the English version and can change the language manually?
-
Hi Guys,Gianluca brings up some good points.Talking about very real situations that happen to me quite often. I will prefer to read German and if there is a conversion like a purchase obviously I will have to back out and find the product that I hope is in stock for the US market.I think placing something the language that is native to the country and you can only hope the visitor.
"We saw you are visiting us from the USA. If you want you can go to www.domain.com. If not, do not consider this advice" (this is what Amazon does, for instance). Gianluca
- User see the English version and can change the language manually?
I would say user see native version for whatever country you're actually assuming that they are visiting from. Well said GianlucaAll the best,Thomas
-
You are not telling us if the different language versions are in the same website or in different ones.
In fact, if they are in different domains, the ideal - IMHO - is to not redirect people to the one corresponding to the their IP if they expressly entered in another language version (i.e.: the user is in the USA, like Thomas, but goes to www.domain.de because he is German). In those case is better presenting an advice to those user saying: "We saw you are visiting us from the USA. If you want you can go to www.domain.com. If not, do not consider this advice" (this is what Amazon does, for instance).
If the different language/country versions are on the same domain, then the ideal would be making those users landing on the correct language/country page because they clicked on their corresponding URLs from search thanks to hreflang. But, at the same time, letting them free to navigate throughout all versions (if there are not legal reasons for forbidding that, i.e. products that can be sold in one country but on in others for whatever reason).
Then, again in the case of multicountry in the same domain name, if users goes to the home page because of direct, a link or type-in, then you can use the same tactic I described before in case of different domains.
-
Well think that if you are in the end user / visitor's shoes.
I'm German and although I spend most of my life in United States, I would prefer German I have a better understanding of it. So if you prefer English over any other language or would you like to have to choose?
That's the way I will look at it in. You said something about IP address and they do matter ONLY if you do for have not correctly set up your site in GWT with hreflang.
So the good thing to check out would be WP engine Mercury project GeoIP that might have some interesting things for you to learn more about the subject. It is trying to provide the best end-user experience.
http://wpengine.com/support/geoip-personalizing-content-based-geography/
-
Good question,
I personally lean towards browser language selection and allow the option for manual change. Most major sites do it this way.
I changed my FF browser to DE (German) and noticed many sites will serve my content in German. If it were IP based I wouldn't have noticed many changes. Also with the amount of people who speak multiple languages, deployed overseas, or using proxies, IP based really isn't the best solution.
My vote browser based with manual option hope it helps,
Don
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Href lang tag - do I need it?
Hey Guys! I have a multi-lingual site in Switzerland serving french and german content. URL structure looks like this: homepage (main) http://www.exmaple.ch/ German http://www.exmaple.ch/de/ French http://www.exmaple.ch/fr/ You can choose a drop down on every page to convert the page into french or german. So there are basically two seperate sites, URL's do not cross over i.e. I have no french pages linking to german pages, it is all pretty good. The default language is german. I have checked in Google.ch/ in both languages french and german for which pages are being served up and they seem all relevant, i.e. on french browser settings when I go to google.ch I see french pages being served and vice versa. My question....Do I need href lang tags? Cheers all!
International SEO | | eLab_London0 -
Impact changing domain from ccTLD to .com
I've got a couple of clients who have an international market for their products or services. Both of these clients have a .co.uk domain. For one site the US market is the major audience, the other it's european countries. At the moment, neither of these clients have translated page or content targeted to a specific country. There are no plans at this stage to create such content. Google considers the .co.uk to be targeted to the United Kingdom. The assumption is that by changing this to .com it will increase their international reach. For both the domains, referral and direct traffic is much more diverse than organic (which as you'd expect is heavily UK weighted - but there is some international organic traffic) Does anyone have any experience making such a change? How did the change affect your international reach/visibility? Does anyone have any metrics that they'd like to share that could be used to make a case to clients? (Note, I'm not interested in how you'd go about handling the domain change - I'm happy/confident about doing this.)
International SEO | | DougRoberts0 -
302 Redirect based on Language Detection
Hi, Our online application, magento e-commerce, has a script that detects browser language and does a 302 redirection to the language of choice ... www.mydomain.com/en/ or www.mydomain.com/es/ What's the SEO angle on this? Should I be concerned? thanks, Ben
International SEO | | bjs20100 -
Best local business directories for a digital agency based in London
Does anyone know the best local business directories for SEO purposes. Our business is a digital agency based in London (United Kingdom) Thanks Rob
International SEO | | roberthseo0 -
Google Webmaster Tools - Geographic target - Time till change
One of my clients is targeting UK customers. They have UK IP address. I then noticed that they had their Geographic target set to "Target users in: United States". I advised them to change this. Anyone know: How this could have been set, the client says they didn't do it? How long will it take for Google to see this has been changed? Thanks in advance. Justin
International SEO | | GrouchyKids0 -
Big changes in beginning of december
For one of our biggest sites I noticed a big difference in ranking drops in the beginning of december. The site is in Swedish so the google updates are a bit different than for google.com. For many of our keyword we dropped far down in the SERPs. Most of the keywords we had at top 10, or top 20, but these got first dropped down to 100/150+ but since then they have started to gain a bit, not near the previous results though. For our main keyword (a really high competitive keyword) we got dropped totally (+200). The site is about 7 years old, have good content, regulary updated (1-2 news a day, 2-4 new articles a week). Our traffic is still pretty good, actually almost the same as previous the big drop for the "hard" keyword. We seem to get more traffic for our long tail keywords instead, which is good. I would like be able to get traffic from both types of keywords though. One more thing to add. I have notice that a couple of our competitors, both in this area and other, also got hit in the same way. This should mean that some sort of google update/filter has hit us. So, in short, my question is if anyone knows about a update/filter in the beginning of december for the Swedish market. And, how can we work ourselves back? Edit: Also, the site ranks number one for the titel of the page and for the titel of the hard keywords, the site also ranks number one. The "right" pages also gets in the top when I do a seach for "site:domain.com keyword".
International SEO | | Lobtec0 -
UK based people Need your help
I'm aware that this is not SEO related, but bare with me: Launching a new business venture and need some advise. the site will be located in the UK (for legal reasons) and since I have no experience with UK webhosts. I kinda need your help on selecting a good webhost. Money is not importants but what is: - excellent up times unlimited bandwidth So if you could share your experiences it would be much appreciated. thx in advance 🙂
International SEO | | ReneReinholdt0 -
What is the best way to make country specific IP redirect for only product pricng pages?
My website has 3 services and its price will be different for US/EU/Developed world and Asian/African countries.Apart from pricing page, all other things remain same. I want to use IP based redirect .I heard this thing is called cloaking and used by black-hat guys. What kind of instructions should I give to my web developer to look best to Google/Search bots and correctly show visitors the intended prices.Is there any caution to be taken care of. Thanks for your time
International SEO | | RyanSat0