: How to inform search engines that my site support multilanguages? The website i am working on is translated to 8 languages (English, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Hindi, Russian, Spanish and Portuguese).
The website i am working on is translated to 8 languages (English, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Hindi, Russian, Spanish and Portuguese).
Each time the user select a language, the URL stays the same as i am using a combination of defined variables to change the languages. For example, the URL for the English version (mysite.com) looks like the Chinese version.
My Question: Do i need to specify a certain HTML tag to inform search engines that my website is in 8 languages? if yes, what are the necessary tags and how to define them?
As an extra question, does this technique in translating the website bad for SEO?
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You should definitely have a different URL for each language for SEO.
In your pages you can use Links in the header to inform the bot or useragent of the other languages:
<link rel="Alternate" hreflang="en-US" title="English content" href="/english/page.htm" />
<link rel="Alternate" hreflang="nl-NL" title="Dutch translation" href="/dutch/page.htm" />
Using cookies to determine the language is certainly not SEO friendly, nor is it human, blog, twitter, or anything-else friendly (how could someone ever link to a page in a specific language on such a site?). It is also good to have a "permalink" to support social media propaganda.
There is the "lang" attribute in HTML, which you can add to the parent element: <html lang="en"> - however Google basically ignores it.
Even if that wasn't the case I don't think your system would ever work, as the same URL would be returning different content. You should have different URLs for different languages - either subdomains or separate folders.
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