Enhancing the Visibility of Multilingual Websites

A multilingual website is one that contains content in multiple languages. The use of a multilingual website becomes important when the potential audience of the concerned website are the speakers of more than one language. For example, If a blog dedicated to the World cup soccer teams intends to reach the audience of maximum participating nations, it becomes essential to publish the blog in as many concerned languages as possible.   

Google as usual plays a major role in making the multilingual websites popular among the local visitors as well. To ensure the maximum visibility of a localized website, Google provides some useful tips as given below:

While developing a multilingual website, Google suggests to work a little bit on the URL creation. Such a practice could enable the visitor to know the language of a particular web page only by seeing the URL.

Consider the below example:

The link “http://website.br/en/rio-carnival.html” 

is enough to let the user know that they are visiting the English section of a Brazilian website.

Similarly, the links

“http://website.br/por/rio-carnival.html” or “http://por.website.br/rio-carnival.html”

enable the user to view the similar page in Portuguese.

Such a well specified URL structure also makes it easy to analyze the indexing process of the multilingual content in the website.

Making crawling and indexing easier for multilingual website

According to Google, it is better to provide links in between different multilingual pages with the similar content rather than opting for the automated translations. Sometimes, the automated translations go senseless in proposing the central idea of the web page. This further discourage the targeted audience to visit the website. There fore, creating genuine content in the desired languages for the same page and then enabling their easy navigation through the links is considered to be of great significance for both the indexing and crawling purposes.

Once again citing the earlier example, the user can view the “http://website.br/en/rio-carnival.html” page by default and he can also view the same page in Portuguese by clicking on the provided link to reach the “http://website.br/por/rio-carnival.html” page.

To make the websites more crawlable through their multilingual content, Google highly recommends to get away with the automatic redirection. Such a redirection could create problems both for the user as well as the search engines from seeing all the site versions.

Using Separate URLs for each web page

As per Google, it is also beneficial to use separate URLs to store each of the multilingual content pages. Cookies are not that much advisable to display the translated versions.