reggie35

Canonical links on different language version

by @reggie35 (118), 2 years ago

Hey guys,

I'm publishing some articles for a website that has 3 language versions.

  1. Global (english)
  2. Canada (english)
  3. Germany (german)

Now all articles are published first in global and next duplicated in Canada. I've added canonical url to the global article from the canadian one, but I was wondering if I should do the same with the german translated version of the article as well.

Should I add a canonical link from the german article to the global one that has different URL since the slug is translated as well..

Thank you! :)

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zara
by @zara (150), 2 years ago

Hello :)

I work as a SEO specialist in the digital marketing team for The Klyne Group, which include many companies such as Doona, CuddleCo and Pets Love Scruffs.

I'd use hreflang tag Ideally, you would use the hreflang attribute to indicate to search engines that the page is a localised versions of your other article page. In your example, the Canadian article would be extremely similar to your English article, but I wouldn't canonicalise them. (Canonical tags pass all the lovely goodness to the canonicalised page, so the other pages wouldn't rank as well as your UK version. I imagine you want the Canadian version to rank in Canada?)

I'd add hreflang tags into the head tag of your pages - this is the easiest method If you want all of them to rank and you want search engines to understand that these are articles meant for specific geographical areas, I would put some html into the section of the pages, known as hreflang tag.

How to do it On each of the three pages, the html code needs to point to itself as well as the other 2 pages.(This informs the search engine that there is the version that they are crawling, plus 2 other versions).

So the code needs to include all 3, something like this:

Within the hreflang tag code above, you can see that: en-ca signals that it is the English version for Canada. en-gb indicates that it is the English version for the UK. de-de is for German

X Default is recommended, but not essential

There is also a fall back version that is often recommended but not essential. It's for anyone that falls outside of the geographical areas.(E.g. Imagine an English speaker in Spain).This is shown below as 'x-default'.

Hope this makes sense?

zara
by @zara (150), 2 years ago

Such a shame that it removed my coded examples.

zara
by @zara (150), 2 years ago

I've put a space before com:

zara
by @zara (150), 2 years ago

Add me on Linkedin and I'll message you on there if you like, Zara Crowther

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