seo Question posted in
Some basic information to get you started with this can be found here.

Should default language of multilingual website be a part of the URL? – SEO

I have set up a multilingual website, whose default language is English and it is translated in many more languages. We have chosen for the subdirectory URL strategy, so that our URLs are like example.com/en, example.com/fr etc. Should the default language be omitted from those URLs? So instead of

  • example.com/en
  • example.com/fr
  • example.com/de

we could use

  • example.com (default site language, EN in this case)
  • example.com/fr
  • example.com/de

Which is better in terms of SEO, UX, best practices?

p.s. I have read this and this but focus is given on whether translation of URLs is optimal and they do not really address my question. FYI, in my case, either the English wording is retained (example.com/en/about, example.com/fr/about) or in cases when this is not possible, the URL is transliterated.

Tags:

2

Answers


  1. 0

    This is not a scientific answer, but we have our root url adaptive to the browser language. Eg.

    www.supertext.ch -> Either FR, EN or DE based on the browser

    everything else is 

    www.supertext.ch/en/help  
www.supertext.ch/de/hilfe

    I would always translate the subdirectory. That helps in terms of SEO AND UX.

    Login or Signup to reply.
  2. 0

    I think representing the default language in the URL is the better choice.

    Pros:

    • If you decide to change the default language, you don’t have to change your URLs.
    • Consistency.
    • It allows you to redirect from / based on the visitor’s language preference.
    • It’s a signal that your site is available in multiple languages.
    • It’s easier for users that want to change the language from the URL.
    • It allows users of external search engines to search for pages in the default language only (site:example.com/en/; where site:example.com/ would find pages in all languages).

    Cons:

    I can’t think of any reasons not to include the default language’s code in the URL.

    Login or Signup to reply.
Please signup or login to give your own answer.

Back To Top
Search