Managing multi-regional and multilingual sites

If your site offers different content to users in different languages, countries, or regions,
you can optimize Google Search results for your site.

What’s the difference between multilingual and multi-regional?

• A multilingual website is any website that offers content in more than
  one language. For example, a Canadian business with English and French versions of its site.
  Google Search tries to find pages that match the language of the searcher.
• A multi-regional website is one that explicitly targets users in different
  countries. For example, a product manufacturer that ships to both Canada and the United States.
  Google Search tries to find the right locale page for the searcher.

Some sites are both multi-regional and multilingual: for example, a site might have different
versions for the USA and for Canada, and both French and English versions of the Canadian content.

Managing multilingual versions of your site

If you have identical content in multiple languages on your site, here are some tips for
helping users (and Google Search) find the right page:

Use different URLs for different language versions

Google recommends using different URLs for each language version of a page rather than using
cookies or browser settings to adjust the content language on the page.

If you use different URLs for different languages, use
hreflang annotations
to help Google Search results link to the correct language version of a page.

If you prefer to dynamically change content or reroute the user based on language settings,
be aware that Google might not find and crawl all your variations. This is
because the Googlebot crawler usually originates from the USA. In addition, the crawler sends
HTTP requests without setting Accept-Language in the request header.

Tell Google about your different language versions

Google supports several different
methods for labeling language or region variants of a page, including hreflang annotations
and sitemaps. Mark your pages appropriately.

Make sure the page language is obvious

Google uses the visible content of your page to determine its language. We don’t use any
code-level language information such as lang attributes, or the URL. You can help
Google determine the language correctly by using a single language for content and navigation
on each page, and by avoiding side-by-side translations.

Translating only the boilerplate text of your pages while keeping the bulk of your content in
a single language (as often happens on pages featuring user-generated content) can create a
bad user experience if the same content appears multiple times in search results with various
boilerplate languages.

Let the user switch the page language

If you have multiple versions of a page:

• Avoid automatically redirecting users from one language version of a site to a
  different language version of a site. For example, don’t redirect based on what you think the
  user’s language may be. These redirections could prevent users (and search
  engines) from viewing all the versions of your site.
• Consider adding hyperlinks to other language versions of a page. That way
  users can click to choose a different language version of the page.

Use language-specific URLs

It’s fine to use localized words in the URL, or to use an
Internationalized Domain Name (IDN).
However, be sure to use UTF-8 encoding in the URL (in fact, we recommend
using UTF-8 wherever possible) and remember to escape the URLs properly when linking to them.

Targeting site content to a specific country (geotargeting)

You can target your website or parts of it to users in a single specific country that speaks
a specific language. This can improve your page rankings in the target country, but at the
expense of results in other locales or languages.

To geotarget your site on Google:

• Page or site level: Use locale-specific
  URLs for your site or page.
• Page level:
  Use hreflang or sitemaps
  to tell Google which pages apply to which locations or languages.

Remember that geotargeting isn’t an exact science, so it’s important to consider users who
land on the “wrong” version of your site. One way to do this could be to show links on all
pages for users to select their region and/or language of choice.

Using locale-specific URLs

Consider using a URL structure that makes it easy to geotarget your site, or parts of it, to
different regions. The following table describes your options: