: Should an ecommerce website be translated when moving into a new country, or a new site built from scratch? I have a friend whose eCommerce is working very well in one language. He would like

@Annie201

If you already have an English version of the site you could make this the default page and use the href=lang tag on any other language versions to specify to Google that these are the language equivalents of the English page.

This lets Google determine which language the page should be set to based on the version of the website the user is visiting. For example, if a users language is English and visits the /it version of the web page this should be displayed in Italian.

In terms of the impact from an SEO perspective this will tell Google that there are different versions of the web page and will allow it to be indexed in different language versions.

It's important that your pages translate correctly to avoid pages not making sense and being viewed as spam.

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@Jessie594

Multi-regional and multilingual sites


A multilingual website is any website that offers content in more than
one language. Examples of multilingual websites might include a
Canadian business with an English and a French version of its site, or
a blog on Latin American soccer available in both Spanish and
Portuguese.

A multi-regional website is one that explicitly targets users in
different countries. 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).

Expanding a website to cover multiple countries and/or languages can
be challenging. Because you have multiple versions of your site, any
issues will be multiplied, so make sure you test your original site as
thoroughly as possible and make sure you have the appropriate
infrastructure to handle these sites. Following are some guidelines
and best practices for creating multilingual and/or multi-regional
sites...


You can read the full documentation on Google for best practices here.

I suggest you do indeed create a secondary site/domain name (ie. example.it) to avoid mistranslations, avoiding errors and I think your results will be better targeting the Italian users directly and in turn your Italian site will get better ranking, targeting Italian visitors opposed to a hidden translation. In the end, you will be required to translate all pages regardless of method and this way it will keep you from having a partially translated site opposed to a new site that is all done in Italian from the get go.

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