Support multiple languages on your site

Categories: HTML

Content

don't mix languages in the content
block robots from crawling auto translated pages -> can harm site perception
keep content for each language on a separated url
do not use cookies to change content language
cross link each version of a page (so user can switch with one click)
avoid automatic redirect on perceived language
always use UTF-8 in the url and as much as possible
google will use TLD as strong signal for that country
if single country and general TLD then you should use country targetting of the google search console settings
server ip should be close to the users
indicators of address, google my business, phone,... will be used to localize your content
google does not use geo.position, distribution and/or html tags
use canonical when same translation in more then one place
use hreflang and regional urls

tailored to language, market and culture.
have support available for the language.
english dollar vs english pound
when using culture specific hreflang, also use an only language one
x-default for mixed and language selectors
specify only on the cannonical url
all alternatives should be included, also the page itself
prefered to keep alternatives in a similar directory structure as main language
be consistend with your url structure
display a banner to suggest an alternative page in user language instead of redirecting
avoid putting language or country in a url parameter
use UTF-8 for urls
!! it's not clear if one should or should not translate the urls !!
page speed within the country is a strong signal
add ability to swith language
ensure tourist experience, do not lock users into their current ip location

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="es" href="http://es.example.com/page.html" />

or with html header

Link: <a href="http://es.example.com/" target="_blank">http://es.example.com/; rel="alternate"; hreflang=es"

or in sitemap

<xhtml: link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-gb" ...

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