: Problem with homepage's SEO when using subfolders in a multi language website After watching a hundreds of threads about multilanguage website I haven't found an answer to my specific problem,
After watching a hundreds of threads about multilanguage website I haven't found an answer to my specific problem, so I think its not a common issue and I must have done something terribly wrong ;-)
We have a brand.com website in DE main language and the following subfolders:
/de/ = canonical of / + redirect to /
/it/
/en/
When I crawl google.com for EN keywords or google.it for IT keywords then I get as results the homepage in German language (both title and description) as the top result with no trace of the /it/ or the /en/ homepage.
Is this because /it/ and /en/ both needs a separate link building strategy?
I've already configured Google webmaster tool into the following way:
brand.com, no language preference
brand.com/de/, de language
brand.com/it/, it language
brand.com/en/, en language
Perhaps having "/" as DE main page is it wrong and I should use a different approach?
i.e. like having "/" to be a 301 to /de/ instead ?
Thanks in advance.
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My recommendations:
delete content on current homepage brand.com and replace with a 301 redirect to the most important site, brand.com/de/, or a script that detects the browser language in use.
remove geotargeting in Google Webmaster Tools, as really your site is multi-lingual rather than geotargetted.
Please keep in mind that it generally does not make sense to set a geographic target if the same pages on your site target more than a single country (say, all German-speaking countries) — just write in that language and do not use the geotargeting setting (more on writing in other languages will follow soon!).
googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/03/working-with-multi-regional-websites.html
remove canonical reference from brand.com/de/ to brand.com/
invest in copywriting for the EN site. I don't speak German or Italian, but Google Translate shows the copy to be very different and more search-friendly on those sites than the English version.
Good luck!
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