Google’s International Tips
Our friends at the Google Webmaster Blog have posted about setting up an international website. Here are the most important parts of the post:
• If you can’t get country specific domains (ccTLD’s), get one non country specific domain (like .com) and then do either of these option:
1. Put the content of every language in a different subdomain. For our example, you would have en.example.com, de.example.com, and es.example.com.
2. Put the content of every language in a different subdirectory. This is easier to handle when updating and maintaining your site. For our example, you would have example.com/en/, example.com/de/, and example.com/es/.
• Use the Geographic Target tool in Webmaster Tools if you’re developing a website for a specific regional audience. Google encourages you to set different targets for different subdirectories, though if you’re not going for any one region in particular, you may not wish to use this tool.
• The same content in multiple languages is not considered duplicate content. (Thanks, Google, for clearing this up!) You’ll just want to make sure you keep your content organized well by region so updates to your website are easy to make.
• Check how many of your language pages are indexed by choosing to display only results in your foreign language. This is definitely a handy way to see how you’re ranking and how well Google has indexed your site!
These tips from Google are nice to have. Their blog is a great way to read up on what they think is important to search and website content.
