: Can I create website translations on subdomains or folders without losing my current English rankings? I have a running website of with some hundreds of thousands of pages already indexed, let's

@BetL925

You can change the URLs of your current English content without losing rankings as long as you use 301 redirects and don't change the domain name.

You could use folders if you redirect /page.html -> /en/page.html. Googlebot generally updates the URLs for currently indexed content when permanent redirects are used without changing rankings.

I would recommend subdomains because you can move the hosting of the translated content at some point if you find you need to. With folders, everything has to be hosted in the same location. It often makes sense for site speed to move your translated website closer to the people who are using it.

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@Heady270

To keep your current rankings don't move the current content. For new content create subfolder.

Assume your site looks now like:


example.com/page-one,
/page-two etc.


Assume it is in english.

Then, if you want to translate your content into German, create a subfolder /de/ and double your site structure into it, like


/de/page-one,
/de/page-two.


Your English pages located in the root directory don't change their placement - ergo, they will keep their rankings. But the new folder will begin to rank after it will be visited by crawler and properly indexed.

If you would create the both language versions from scratch, you would create two language folders: en and de, but now, to keep rankings, let the existing pages on their places.

Don't forget to bind both language versions to each other with hreflang. Each page should contain them. I.e.: for page-one

<link rel="alternate" href="http://example.com/page-one" hreflang="en" />
<link rel="alternate" href="http://example.com/de/page-one" hreflang="de" />

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