A multilingual website offers its content in more than one language. For SEO, each language version should have its own crawlable URL, and search engines should be able to assign it to the right audience. A site that targets users in different countries is multiregional (see multiregional website). According to Google, some sites are both.
What does Google recommend?
Google recommends a separate URL for each language version. Cookies or browser settings that change the content at the same URL do not work well, because Google does not evaluate them. Common choices are subdirectories such as /de/ and /en/, subdomains or separate domains.
Google determines the language of a page from its visible content, so each page should use one language. It also says it does not use code-level language information such as the lang attribute or the URL for this. Translating only boilerplate while leaving the main content in one language is discouraged. The versions are linked with hreflang, and visible links let users switch languages.
Google advises against automatically redirecting users from one language version to another, because this keeps users and search engines from seeing all versions.
Example
example.com/en/pricing/ and example.com/de/preise/ are two separate pages. Each carries hreflang entries for itself and the other version.
Common mistakes
- A language switch that runs only through a cookie or parameter and creates no separate URLs
- Navigation is translated but page content stays in the original language
- Missing return tags between the versions
Sources
- Managing multi-regional and multilingual sites – Google Search Centraldevelopers.google.com
- Tell Google about localized versions of your page – Google Search Centraldevelopers.google.com
- Multilingual websites – Lokalise (secondary)lokalise.com
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