Google Makes it Easy to Reach Your International Customers in the Right Language

Have a website with pages which auto-translate certain content (specifically templates like top navigation, etc.) into multiple languages, but keep the bulk of the content the same (in its original language)? Thanks to Google’s outstanding Webmaster know-how, you can give your site easy multilingual translation using just a single URL. This relatively quick and easy fix will ensure that every visitor to your site will be directed to the correct language-specific version of your page, while helping you avoid duplicate content issues.

The full article direct from the Googlites themselves can be found here. The short version involves adding just a little bit of Google-created code to your site:

<link rel=”alternate” hreflang="a-different-language" href="http://url-of-the-different-language-page" />

Then, with a few more adjustments, all your website’s users will be directed to the proper version of the site, based on their language preference (using their IP address, accept-language HTTP header, and/or other user info). No matter what language is displayed, and no matter how many other languages you want your content to be available in, every version will ultimately be found under one URL, with the help of 301 redirects or link rel=“canonical” tags.

There’s a lot more to it than that, of course, so be sure to read the complete original article to get all the details. It’s pretty heavy with technical jargon, so it’s not the easiest read (I had to read it about five times just to be sure I was getting the general idea correct), but it’s a supremely easy fix for a potentially difficult conundrum. If your website users speak Spanish, French, German, or even whatever language is spoken in Guam,* they’ll find it in the right language the first time on any Google search. A unified URL for all your content will help you avoid PageRank dilution, as well as other problems which may arise due to multiple pages of (essentially) duplicate content.

It’s an incredibly useful little patch for your site, plus it lets you use the astoundingly official-sounding phrase “multilingual template content unification.”

*Guamish.

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