Thread: Anyone have any experience of getting a multilanguage site indexed by google......

.....in all languages?

I'm investigating the possibility of expanding our ecommerce activity to include the rest of Europe (we're currently UK only).

I know I have the capability to set up the current store for multi language & multi currency, but I'm concerned about google rankings in other languages.

A couple of thoughts I've had :-
1. Use geolocation to serve different content depending upon location (does google use different bots for different geographical locations?).
2. Have multiple instances of each product/category - 1 for each language - maybe use vector/genre to prevent one languages products being included in the navigation of another languages skin (create a skin for each language)....

I'm really not sure where I'm going with this - maybe I'll end up with multiple instances of the storefront, but this isn't ideal.

Another possibility just occured to me & that's getting some custom dev work done to enable multiple domain names for the same storefront serving different languages.


Sorry this is a little random, as I say, I'm not really sure at the moment - just looking for any thoughts or ideas.


TTFN

BFG

This is a good post, with several interesting questions.

Regarding geolocation: I'm not a fan of it. Those services always think that I'm in Plano, TX, because that's where AT&T happens to terminate my DSL connection. Also, AOL is known to use proxies on both sides of the pond for the same user; one second, they're in Boston, the next page request, they're in France.

Regarding Google datacenter locations: They have several dozen well-known datacenters worldwide, each containing their slice of the Url space. Google can optionally filter results based on the Url of the requestor; for example, google.com can optionally return different results than google.fr for the same request.

The ?localesetting= query string can be appended to any Url in your store to force a response in a specific locale. For example: /p-123-blue-widget.aspx?localesetting=fr-FR would return your page in French. The trick is getting Google to index all of your Url's with that query string.

You could also add a custom Url pattern to your web.config to support another locale; for example /pf-123-blue-widget.aspx could always switch to a french locale. The new pattern could be added to your sitemap, to give a way for search engines to find them.

Originally Posted by ASPDNSF Staff - Jon

You could also add a custom Url pattern to your web.config to support another locale; for example /pf-123-blue-widget.aspx could always switch to a french locale. The new pattern could be added to your sitemap, to give a way for search engines to find them.

Jon That's an AWESOME Idea - Thank you.
Certainly gives me some thinking to do.....


TTFN

BFG

The Url pattern technique will be significantly simpler to implement in ML v8.1 (a beta is available now). We've implemented the System.Web.Routing namespace, which will allow you to map incoming Urls, as well as generate outgoing Urls (cool!), simply by tweaking Url pattern strings in web.config.

Taking this a step further, if you're migrating from an old set of Url patterns (for example, if you're upgrading from OSCommerce, Volusion, or Storefront.Net), or if you just feel like switching Url patterns, you can include those old patterns in web.config, and we'll automatically do the "301 Moved Permanently" redirect for you, so you don't lose PageRank.

Originally Posted by ASPDNSF Staff - Jon

The ?localesetting= query string can be appended to any Url in your store to force a response in a specific locale. For example: /p-123-blue-widget.aspx?localesetting=fr-FR would return your page in French. The trick is getting Google to index all of your Url's with that query string.

Just in from the Google Webmaster Blog:
Choose the URL that the search engine will index your page with.
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogsp...canonical.html

Hello I've just read all these posts and the info is very interesting. My specific situation seems to be a hybrid of these.

Here's the situation:

I have three locales on ML version 8.0.1.2:
Canadian English
Canadian French
United States English

The URLs for every page for all three locales (Canadian English, United States English and Canadian French) are exactly the same.

Canadian English and United States English are pretty much the same content on all the pages. The minor differences are:

Price USD$ versus CAD$
Sizes in imperial (inches) versus metric (cm)
A few spelling differences (color) versus (colour) etc.

The French locale has (text) content in a different language.

After reading all these posts I can see that there is an option to change the URL
and there is now a google canonical to set perfered URLs.

I'm not really sure if either of these options will actually solve the three problems I have:
1. Google penalizing my site for duplicate content (Canadian English and US English locales)
2. Identical URLs with different content (Canadian English, US English same and French Canadian - different)
3. Indexing the three locales according to the user version - ie if I'm in Quebec or France and I search for a product will google return the french version of my page? They won't if I use the canonical tag.

Seems to me that I need to implement different solutions for the English locales and the French locale.

A bit complicated but any further suggestions would be appreciated.
Cheers!