I made a multilanguage website for my client. It’s pretty small website, so we made second language using “copy paste” method, not an application. First language - french, second - english. So for the home page in second language is Inspection Camera for Demanding Professionals - RinnoVision. We received a recmendation from SEO expert to change it for https://www.rinnovision.com/en. I can’t redirect to the page that doesn’t exist. I can’t delete “home” slug because it’s obligatory to have a slug. What I can do is to create the home page for English version and out “en” as a slug. SO that page will be outside of the folder “English”. My doubt is about the role of the folder. Does the folder structure influence something or it’s just for convenience? Is it wrong to create a English homepage outside the English folder?
I suspect that what your SEO person is trying to do is to represent your languages in parallel, so that every English-language page is under the /en path, and every French one is under /fr.
Then, you could use a script for browser language on the homepage / and redirect them to the most appropriate language base on their browser preferences or geolocation.
While it looks tidy, there is no real SEO reason to do this. Google doesn’t have an SEO rule for how multilingual sites are structured- you can build it however you like, and then indicate to Google what language the pages are ( e.g. <html lang="en"> ) and which pages are translations of each other ( using <link hreflang... > ).
The bigger issue is that the current version of Webflow doesn’t make any of these things easy;
You can have one language defined per site, with no ability to override it per page ( except perhaps using javascript )
You can put your link hreflangs in just <head> code, but you have to manage those translation links manually. This gets more complex if you’re mixing content like English/French blog posts into the same CMS collection.
There is no ability to split CMS pages under multiple paths, so that french posts are under /fr/blog and English ones under /en/blog- however a very new feature in Webflow would allow you to do this using two separate collections, and the new subfolder capability.
There is no language detector/redirector built in, you’d need to roll your own.
Webflow announced Multilingual efforts in the works last Nov, and has been silent since- but you can see small changes happening. The /sitemap.xml now shows a language identifier and I suspect that the blog-path change above is related as well.
Your best approach is probablyto delay this for6 to 12 months until the platform supports it, OR to use a 3rd party product that enables these capabilities for you. Polyflow is a very well designed one I’ve used, there are others as well.
So my question is about technical side of building Home page outside the English folder (because only this way I can have desired URL). If Google doesn’t have an SEO rule for how multilingual sites are structured, so I don’t see any problem with that.
That will have zero impact on SEO, and it’s not how I’d typically build a client’s site.
The redirect is more likely to cause SEO damage than benefit you.
Ideally you want the homepage to have content in your primary language ( or make it multilingual ), with no redirects.
That said, if you really want this structure;
/en - English homepage /en/... - English content pages
Then all you need to do is move your /en/home page outside of the folder, and assign it a slug of en. Webflow allows you to assign the same slug to both a static page and a folder, so that, they will respond the the appropriate paths.
