i would like to focus on the best way for setting up a SEO-friendly multilanguage site with Joomla 1.5 + Joomfish 2.0.
Let me tell you that i get interested on this topic because i'm going to build a multilanguage site for a 4-star-Hotel with 5 languages (english, german, italian, french, russian) and that after several on-topic searches I've realized that this is still an open debate without a definitive good practice.
So I think going deeply through it could be helpful for the whole Joomla and Joomfish community.
Actually, from a general SEO point of view, i consider a good start point what Matt Cutts stated in his blog post http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/subdomains-and-subdirectories/. Replying to one user's comment, Matt (what an oracle !
) said:...if you have sites with say French and German versions for a business, my preferences would be:
1. ccTLDS such as example.fr or example.de
2. After than, subdomains such as fr.example.com or de.example.com.
3. If that’s not possible, I’d use subdirectories such as example.com/fr/ or example.com/de/
Well, right now, for what i know (and please enlight me if i am wrong), Joomla currently lacks the ability to create a multidomain multilingual website from one database and one code core: you can't link your example.de to your German version, or your example.co.uk to your English version, an so on. It's not possible, isn't it ?
What we can do is "simply" add JoomFish module, which provides multilingualism at the content level that in other words means we'll only be able to duplicate the identical content in other languages.
So, looking back to Matt's above three options we're able to handle only point 3:
3. If that’s not possible, I’d use subdirectories such as example.com/fr/ or example.com/de/
Assuming this is true (and again please enlight me if i am wrong), i think we should then concentrate on some specific topics, giving assumed all the other well known SEO good practices the web is full of.
These are the topics in my opinion:
1 - hacking joomla index.php page (in the <head> section) to properly set different <meta lang=""> for each languages:
- pages "inside" example.com/fr/ with <meta lang="fr">
pages "inside" example.com/de/ with <meta lang="de">
.............
.............
2 - using <span lang="">some text content in the proper language<span> inside each page content:
- text of pages "inside" example.com/fr/ will be enclosed in <span lang="fr"></span>
text of pages "inside" example.com/de/ will be enclosed in <span lang="de"></span>
.............
.............
3 - feed to the Search Engines different sitemap.xml for different languages. Someone knows if is this possible ? I mean:
- every page of example.com/fr/ listed in fr_sitemap.xml, to be indexed in Google.fr, Yahoo.fr, ...
every page of example.com/de/ listed in de_sitemap.xml, to be indexed in Google.de, Yahoo.de ...
.............
.............
What do you think about this stuff ?
Thank you all in advance for your opinions and ideas
Cheers
.
