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How do I have both language versions of my site spidered?

Dave, I want to design a website in two languages. But if search engines only let you submit one 'index.htm' on the same domain, how can I make sure both language versions of the site receive equal attention?

Dave's Answer:

An interesting question, particularly since my first book was on software internationalization (Global Software, now out of print). But the solution is easier than you think.

What I think you're not realizing here is that Google and other search engines index and sort through pages, not sites. When you think about your "Web site", you quite naturally get anxious about having two different sites, but take a deep breath. All is well with two areas on your site.

However, a few thoughts: first, make sure that your character encoding matches each language and use other meta tags to ensure that spiders and search engines can correctly categorize your site as Spanish, French, Chinese, etc. That'll help you match when users constrain their search to a particular language or culture.

Second thought: don't use too many levels of subdirectories to organize your site because many search engine marketing experts believe that the further into your site your pages lie, the harder it is for you to achieve top search result ranking. That is, "www.yourdomain.com/fr_index.html" is much better than "www.yourdomain.com/french/index.html".

Finally, I don't know your language skills, but I always recommend that people hire native language speakers to go through their pages and ensure that colloquialisms and regional dialects are used appropriately. There's nothing more frustrating than having native speakers snicker at your Web page and then leave it without ever telling you how awkwardly it's all worded.

Good luck to you! Let me know how things go...

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Comments

Dave,

My comment first. Yes, it's good to have the language code, but you also need to be careful to choose the most universal code for that language. Many Asian languages for example have several encoding settings that aren't always compatable with one another.

Not really a comment, more of another question along those lines.

A few days ago I noticed that when Google was doing some system maintanance, they had a message stating that the system was working, but it couldn't be accessed at the moment, and that it should be back up and available by a certain time.

Not a big trick :-)

The interesting thing was that they had this message show in about 14 languages all on one page. Although I couldn't read all of the languages, it was easy to see that there weren't any broken characters, ie they were actually languages and not gibberish.

Was that a special encoding that they used in order to be able to do that?

I'm using WinXP with about as many language supports pre-installed and some I installed as I can get because I use it for multi-lingual texts, but I often see errors when I'm viewing for instance, Japanese explanations of Korean words. Sometimes the characters aren't displayed correctly even though my computer reads and displays those languages in other situations with no difficulties.

Thanks,

Allen

Posted by: Allen Williams at March 2, 2005 8:11 AM

I have had both parts of a bilingual site spidered and listed on Google, but the only thing is a lot of people searching say in the UK or France will use the option in Google to view pages from their own country. As my site is a .com, the French person who does not search the whole web would not find it...as yet I have not thought of a way around this!

Posted by: Peter James at July 23, 2005 11:19 AM

I have a lot to say, but ...

I have a lot to say, and questions of my own for that matter, but most of all I'd like to say thank you for all your efforts on this Web site by buying you a chai!

I do have a comment, now that you mention it!