Multilingual SEO
In one sentence
Optimising a site for audiences in several languages.
Analogy Mental model
Several branches of one shop, each speaking the local language. Paris in French, Tokyo in Japanese, New York in English.
In practice What you actually do
Subdirectories are the simplest structure to run and the easiest to consolidate authority into. Declare each language and its siblings with hreflang, keep one URL per language, and translate the navigation as carefully as the content.
Where people get burned Pitfalls
Automatic redirection by browser language or IP is the classic mistake. The crawler arrives from one location and can only ever see one version, so the others never get indexed.
This entry was written in English from the Chinese original, not machine-translated. Read the Chinese version →