I have a page example.com that includes a language file based on visitor's country (through IP). There is only one page but several language files.  Scenarios:  visitor in UK or any other country not supported by my languages -> example.com (language in English)  visitor from IT -> example.com (language in Italian)  The UK visitor changes the language to Italian -> example.com/it  The IT visitor changes the language to English -> example.com/en  The IT visitor who sees tha page in English, deletes the /en from the browser -> example.com (language in Italian)  HTML  I have set it like   &lt;html lang="en"&gt; &lt;link rel="alternate" href="/it"  hreflang="it"&gt;   Questions   Should I also add the "en" version, that means all the available languages? Is my structure the correct way of doing this?   Thank you
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When I set up a site in multiple languages, how should I set up my URLs for search engines and usability?  Let's say my site is www.example.com, and I'm translating into French and Spanish. What is best for usability and SEO?  Directory option:  http://www.example.com/sample.html http://www.example.com/fr/sample.html http://www.example.com/es/sample.html   Subdomain option:  http://www.example.com/sample.html http://fr.example.com/sample.html http://es.example.com/sample.html   Filename option:  http://www.example.com/sample.html http://www.example.com/sample.fr.html http://www.example.com/sample.es.html   Accept-Language header:  Or should I simply parse the  header and generate content server-side to suit that header?  Is there another way to do this? If the different language versions don't have different urls, what do I do about the search engines?    UPDATE 2011-12-06  Google has new recommendations for meta tags for explicitly pointing to other language content: .  UPDATE 2012-05-25  Related but not precisely:   UPDATE 2013-06-12  includes discussion of several URL schemes directly relevant to the question.
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If you try to enter a internationalized domain name as your "website" in your profile, it will be silently stripped of any non-English characters.  Ex: My webiste is  but when I try to enter that it saves it as http://linus.unnebck.se/ when it actually should display linus.unnebäck.se and link to http://linus.xn--unnebck-9wa.se/ (or just link with the ä, don't now what is the right thing to do).  As I wrote this post I also noticed that the markup ends the link at the first non-English character aswell, look at the example above.
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Several of my site's pages are appearing in search results with [Translate this page] next to it. When I click that it takes me to Google Translate and translates my page "from Catalan to English".  The pages are in English but have a couple of foreign words (actually Japanese romanisations, not Catalan) that appear to be tripping Google up.  A few weeks ago I set the html tag to &lt;html lang="en"&gt; which from research appears to be the best method to specify the language of a document. Google has cached the pages with this attribute but it is still offering to translate.  More research led me to a "notranslate" attribute which prevents translation entirely: &lt;html lang="en" class="notranslate"&gt;. The problem now is users cannot translate from English to their desired language!  Are there any other solutions that force Google to parse my site as English only?
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I am working at a project that needs a biilingual translation (content + interface). I've installed the following modules:  Locale + Content translation (core modules) Internationalization Module (i18n) Variable Module (required by Internationalization) – it deals with meta tags Admin Menu   I can't find a way to:  To provide interface translation for front-end only. Admin should be in English   Note: I assume this can be done by deactivating the language block on admin side) but how can this be done without duplicating the theme (the same theme for admin but with the block language disable).  How can this tasks could be accomplished?
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I'm too bored of seeing sites like Google and such show up in my native language, I would rather like them to be in English. Yet, I have to explicitly change the URL to .com and en and that kind of parameters in order for them to show up in English. Can I somehow force this?  So, how is Google configured?  However, it is set to English on the site itself so it has to be my browser:    Then, how does my browser land up on non-english pages, like Google?  It usually shows up in non-English when I'm performing a search, which uses:  {google:baseURL}search?{google:RLZ}{google:acceptedSuggestion}{google:originalQueryForSuggestion}{google:searchFieldtrialParameter}{google:instantFieldTrialGroupParameter}sourceid=chrome&amp;ie={inputEncoding}&amp;q=%s   When performing a search, it fills these variables in with non-english values.  How can I tell my browser to fill these in with the English values?  My Google Chrome options give preference to English:
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My home page could be potentially linked as:  http://example.com http://example.com/ http://example.com/?ref=1 http://example.com/index.html http://example.com/index.html?ref=2  (the same page is served for all those URLs)   I am thinking about defining a canonical URL to make sure Google doesn't consider those urls to be different pages:  &lt;link rel="canonical" href="/" /&gt; (relative) &lt;link rel="canonical" href="http://example.com/" /&gt; (trailing slash) &lt;link rel="canonical" href="http://example.com" /&gt; (no trailing slash)   Which one should be used? I would just slap / but messing with canonical seems like a scary business so I wanted double check first.  Is it a good idea at all for defining a canonical URL for a home page?
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What would you recommend as a URL structure for setting up a multilingual site when optimizing for SEO?  I'm thinking:  www.yoursite.com/en/some-category/some-article/ www.yoursite.com/sv/en-kategori/en-artikel/ (Swedish)   Or would you prefer creating a subdomain (i.e. sv.yoursite.com) or similar instead?  From what I know it seems easier integrating a /language/ directory when in combination with .htaccess.
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I'm working under 12.04 and suppose I have a Firefox windows active (or in foreground) with English as input language and I need to type a document in other language using some text editor.   With the text editor in foreground (or active) and the input language set to a non-English one, when I bring Firefox in foreground (or making it active) the input language remains set to the non-English and the language flag does not switch to English (as it would be expected, since I do not alter the language during the whole Firefox session).  Because of this, I have to make extra moves and change the input language manually every time I switch from the text editor to Firefox and back to text editor. This was not happening with 10.04, and each application windows had the corresponding input language set to its default or previous session every time I was bringing it to the foreground!   How will I make 12.04 to behave the same way?
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I'm integrating SF with other systems using the standard SF API (SOAP and REST). For this, I'm using a specific user which has a special profile (using API Only permission). The Integration user has the Language set on English.   However I need to return the request results on different languages (ES, FR, etc). For instance, the value of picklist should be translated.   Query  Is it possible set on login or in the request the language?
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My pages contain German characters and I have typed the text in between the  HTML tag, but the browser views some characters differently. Do I need to include anything in HTML to properly display German characters?  &lt;label&gt; ausgefüllt &lt;/label&gt;
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Simple question  What is better:  http://www.example.com/product/123/subpage/456.html   or  http://www.example.com/product?123/subpage/456   As far as I know they would rank the same SEO wise, but my SEO knowledge might be a little off. Also the last one seems to be easier and cleaner to implement on my end.  Please explain to me which is better and for what reasons.
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I'd place in the same page two abstract section.One created using my own language and one in english language. If I tried this:  \selectlanguage{italian} \begin{abstract}     \lipsum[1] \end{abstract}  \selectlanguage{english} \begin{abstract}     \lipsum[1] \end{abstract}   but they are placed into two different pages  Edit:  this is my environment definition:  \newenvironment{abstract}{     \clearpage     \vspace*{\fill}     \begin{center}%         \bfseries\abstractname     \end{center}}%     {\vfill\clearpage}
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I have heard(read) SEO experts who claims that you server position will affect your SEO. In the latest example it was about an international site targeting the Russian market so:   Does the server location affect how many visitor you will get from specific country. Does the TLD affects SEO outside that it is easy to type the TLD of your country   If the above have any effect what will be if you by TLD domain for the countries you are targeting and make them redirect to you international one, for example:   example.com - international example.ru - redirects to example.com/ru/ example.de - redirects to example.com/de/
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Based on  I shouldn't need to give the lang- prefix when specifying a language for a tag, however this doesn't appear to be the case for CSS.  This is the result of specifying just &lt;!-- language: css --&gt; on a block of code:    Notice how the IDs (#) are being treated as comments rather than style declarations, and there is no nice formatting on the property names.  This is the result of specifying &lt;!-- language: lang-css --&gt; on the same block of code:    I'm not 100% sure if this is a problem, but if it is: can this be fixed?
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If I use a name like "www.example.com" to go to a web page, the browser will start from right to left, looking at the TLD to find the domain and then proceed further. If I enter the IP address of that host, how will the browser parse it?
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If I have example.com, and blog.example.com, do search engines see those as one site or two? Will using subdomains hurt SEO? I have some technical reasons why I can't use example.com/blog.
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My question is not technical (how to do it using X technology), it's about choosing proper approach that is good for SEO.  Description  Let's say I have a website example.com. It's a multilingual site, but there is no default language at root level. Instead of that I'd like to redirect to proper subdirectory based on http_accept_language (or any other condition, whatever) to keep things consistent. Condition is unimportant right now, but let's make it easier with example:  example.com     # redirects to … example.com/es  # … /es if spanish is accepted language example.com/da  # … /es if danish is accepted language example.com/en  # … /en otherwise   They're actually the same websites, with translated content so if example.com/en/items/1 exists, also /es/items/1 and /da/items/1 exist. Of course all pages have alternate hreflang links etc.  Question  Is it good design? Can you tell me why if not? And how should it be done?