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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.

Community
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Argyro Kazaki
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    You should check out a prior answer to this question here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/21985164/best-practice-for-urls-of-multi-language-websites – Anthony Lavall Jan 18 '18 at 04:21
  • Possible duplicate of [Best practice multi language website](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/19249159/best-practice-multi-language-website) – Uwe L. Korn Nov 08 '19 at 12:46

2 Answers2

3

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.

Community
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unor
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  • If yes, how to deal with homepage? You can not have same content on `example.com/` and `example.com/en/`... so? What do you recommend? Redirect `example.com/` to `example.com/en`... or vice versa `example.com/en` to `example.com/` ?? And with 302 or 301? – Matěj Kříž Aug 14 '19 at 07:36
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    @MatějKříž: `example.com/` only gets shown to users who type it manually (search engines will index `example.com/en` etc.), so this root page should lead users to their language variant. See [my answer on Webmasters SE](https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/a/108961/17633). – unor Aug 14 '19 at 09:26
  • @MatějKříž You should use redirect which redirects from / to language subdirectory, /en/ or /pl/ based on browser's preferred language for example. Users never should stay on root. You can do redirects with .htaccess if you using Apache. – Eldar Agalarov May 11 '20 at 13:56
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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.

Remy
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  • I would refrain from serving different content based on browser language due to SEO and URL consistency reasons. Maybe a better approach would be to redirect the user just on their very first visit to the correct language. – cherouvim Jul 14 '16 at 04:54
  • I would have agreed with you, but even Google thinks that is ok to serve different languages on the same page (Automatically redirect users or dynamically serve the appropriate HTML content depending on users’ location and language settings): https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2014/05/creating-right-homepage-for-your.html – Remy Jul 14 '16 at 12:30