Need help with Multi lingual de-en site

Classic General
1

I really need some help getting my head around the SEO for my multi lingual site. It’s foundation based with RWML for the translations. My site has recently dropped way down in google ratings and I’m trying to get it back up again but don’t really know where to start!. If anyone has some experience with multilingual seo and RWML I’d really appreciate some tips, pointers how I can improve the SEO.
Thanks,
the site in question : www.silence-of-touch.com

2

I recently built a couple of English/Spanish sites. After weighing up all the options using stacks, I went with a subfolder option. Built 2 separate sites on the same domain. Google also prefers this option, and for SEO it allows complete control over both sites.

Then I just put a button in the menu on each site going to the English/Spanish sites.

Google says that they use the page content to determine the language, and they ignore any html language attributes.

1 Like
3

Additionally you can automatically redirect the visitor by a rewrite rule in the .htacces:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP:Accept-Language} ^en [NC]
RewriteRule ^$ http://mysite.com/en/ [L,R=301]

RewriteCond %{HTTP:Accept-Language} ^de [NC]
RewriteRule ^$ http://mysite.com/de/ [L,R=301]

etc…

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-l

RewriteRule ^(en|de|nl|fr|es)/?$ index.php?lang=$1 [QSA,NC,L]
6 Likes
4

Great addition, thanks!

5

Hi Neil, thanks for the tip, and how did u set it up on your server? a landing page or did you put the local version in the root and the translation one level down? or both folders in the root?

6

I created a subfolder on the server called “spanish”, then duplicated the English version and set the publishing to go to the subfolder.

I also renamed any partials with “ES” at the end to visually see it was the Spanish version. Not necessary, but just keeps things easy.

Then just change all the content in the duplicate project to the other language, put a button in the menu of each site to link to the other language version. You could also do what apfelpuree suggested above.

7

Hi apfelmus (couldn’t resist) your in Germany??
I like the idea of adding your redirect into the .htaccess
is that the complete code for it?
Am confused by the etc…

8

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