Sitemap for multilingual website

Classic
1

Hello,

I made a multilingual website, that starts with one general landingpage, asking to select a language, after which the client is guided to a NL, FR or EN subdomain.

Now I want google to crawl my website, so i gave it the sitemap of the general landing page, but it sees only one page.

How can I make google crawl the subdomains too ?

Structure is as follows:

www/landingpage
www/landingpage/NL
www/landingpage/FR
www/landingpage/EN

Do i need to create a robot.txt file for that ?

Thanks for any advice.

Marc

2

Hi @marpatbv,

This depends on how you organise your website.

If you’re keeping everything in one project, then the standard RapidWeaver sitemap functionality should work out of the box, as do other solutions (like SEO Helper). They’ll “see” the pages you’ve put inside the subdomains and add them into the sitemap.

However, if you’re keeping track of the subdomains using separate project files, then this won’t work. You’ll have separate sitemap.xml files in the root of each subdomain instead, which Google sometimes sees and most of the time doesn’t.

If the latter is the case, you could try to add each sitemap to Search Console manually.

If that fails too, you’re going to have to build your own sitemap.xml for the root of the landing page, and refer to the sitemaps of the sub domain root folders from there.

Having said all of this, having subdomains for languages is fairly old school (although I do have some clients that demand this, and even one of my own websites still has it…). Google often sees the contents of the subdomains as non-canonical and refuses to index it.

Instead, you could go for a singular page with dynamic content replacement. This means that everybody sees the same page, but with content aimed at their browser preference or geolocation. Google ‘gets’ this as well, and will neatly offer different search results based on the searcher’s language.

You can do so using the Agent stack (about $40, by Weaver’s Space) or the RWML stack ($30, stacks4stacks.com). You’ll need the Stacks plugin by Yourhead to be able to use either of these.

Cheers,
Erwin

1 Like
3

Hello Erwin,

Thanks for your answer. Indeed I made my website with different projects.
I tried with one project but that didn’t work out well because the theme is wanted to use did not allow me to change the language of the menu.

I used the Concierge tool from Will Woodgate to create my website. It also allows to use several languages. After some brainstorming with Will I decided to use separate projects for each language since this seemed the best way to go for someone like me with little webbuilding experience.

Unfortunately, I am now stuck with the sitemap.xml file.
I’ll try to make one manually and let you know the outcome.

Best regards,

Marc

1 Like
4

some people have used @joeworkman agent stack that I have seen in the past

5

I haven’t checked the agent stack yet, but I’ll take a look at it.

Anyway, I added the 4 sitemaps together, and now google found all my pages :slight_smile:

Problem solved.

Thanks for the help !

2 Likes
7

Hello Micheal,

I used Notepad++ to make one main sitemap file. It was done in 2 minutes. :slight_smile:

Best regards,

Marc

1 Like
8

Hi @Micheal,

That’s a good summary of my answer!

Cheers,
Erwin

9

Of course it is, it’s a bot. :robot:

@Heroic_Nonsense If you notice summaries like this that regurgitate your answers, feel free to flag the post so it goes into our moderation queue. :slightly_smiling_face:

1 Like