Multilingual and Multicultural Search Engine Optimization: part 1

I was stuck with this issue and it seems there’s not a lot of reference or how tos around. I’ve collected best practices from 10people’s experience, blogs and forums, and I’ve placed them in this post.

The assumpion is that you run a .com in more than one language and that you want to get the most out of Search Engines without bothering users.

What you find in this post:

1. content provision: language selection / detection
2. website structure: local domains versus .com domain
3. backlink campaign: how to get the best out of local directories / blogs / forums

content provision: language selection / detection

The first issue you encounter is what language provide users visiting .com and how to keep language choice between pages.

You cannot use cookies to mantain language choice because stupid SE spiders don’t accept them. You cannot even use sessionIDs because most spiders won’t crawl such formed URLs.

The only solution seems to use different URLs for different content. This leaves you the option between local CCTLD (more on this later) and .com/it/ kind of URLs.

Language selection should be based on Accept-Language header if present but user should be able to easily switch to a different language of her choice. Since most spiders are recognized as US-English, doing this way would point them to the english content of the site, living everything else unindexed. Because of this reason it is important to have a language selection page somewhere on the website (not the homepage, use it for something useful!) that points out to different language URLs.

How does a search engine detect language and localized content? Basically these are the key factors:

• IP geolocation of the webserver
• CCTLD - if you own a .fr website SEs will consider it located in France
• SEs can have a guess on the vocaboulary used in the document. They would be able to distinguish German from French, but probably not US-english from Aussie-english, or German from Austrian.
• language tag
• language of backlinks to your site from .fr, .it, .de, … webistes

Don’t place mixed language content on the same page and always put the appropriate language tag.

In part 2 we’re going to cover “website structure: local domains versus .com domain” and the issue of PageRank splitting among URLs.