I was thinking of using Weglot. But paying another $9,90 a month just to have a site translated seems a bit much?
Can’t I just make duplicates of all the pages and translate them? Or does this have implications for SEO?
Would love to hear your thoughts!
Yes I have but that doesn’t seem to be very good for SEO.
As far as I can tell the only 100% seo-friendly solution is using Weglot.
Can’t I just make duplicates of all the pages and translate them? Or does this have implications for SEO?
I feel like this: [TUTORIAL] Full Multi Language Site - Easy to set-up and to use!
is just as bad for SEO and makes it unnecessarily hard as I’m running into multiple problems with it.
Does anyone have an answer on this?
Hi there!
If you want to build a multilingual site, you may potentially duplicate the content and translate the pages. Once a language is changed, it adds a parameter to the URL, for example, www.exampleshop.com?lang=en, or www.exampleshop.com?lang=fr.
Regarding SEO, multilingual site may potentially violate duplicate content penalty of google as it has multiple versions with slight variations. But if you set up hreflang tags correctly and let google know your website structure of multilingual site, it can avoid penalty and won’t effect your SEO.
If you want to know details about how to set up hreflang tag, you may look at the post: https://geotargetly.com/hreflang-seo-guide-for-multilingual-regional-websites
Hope it helps!
What adds the parameter to the URL?
Sounded like this parameter gets added on it’s own, but I don’t think this is something that would happen.
I’m actually playing with the idea of duplicating my pages to translate right now. As long as hreflang and canonical tags are set right, nothing should go wrong with SEO.
As a matter of fact, hreflang tags are good for SEO because the URLs in the cluster share their ranks, so it helps other languages that have a lower score to rank higher.
An other point to consider is using folders to classify the different languages.
You would then get something like https://www.example.com/name-of-page for the English variant and https://www.example.com/es/name-of-page for a Spanish variant.
As far as I know, google takes URL structure into consideration to localize websites (someone can correct me on this if I’m mistaken).
This also makes it a little more tidy to work, so can’t really hurt.
My ranking on Ahref went down to 8% from 100% when I started using Weglot. And so far I haven’t figured out how to solve the issue of missing self-referencing. Can you help?
You would be better off writing to weglot support about that. And if you can, add a follow up here and tell us if this issue was resolved and what a problem was!