Multilingual website SEO

[papalife]

Hallo community,

I have a website not online shop and it is multilingual (german, english, france, spanish, italian).

My website has hosting in france and it is the same for every language.

So I want when someone from france open my website this give him the france version of website. Also when someone from germany open my website this give him the german version of my website and so on for other languages. How can this be done practically ?

I want for every country to have different META DATA so that I can have better SEO for each country. So same design for every country but different translation and different META DATA. Google should understand the different version of the website of each country. How can this be done practically ?

Any suggestions ?

Thanks in advance.
Apo

Linkback: https://www.modified-shop.org/forum/index.php?topic=32734.0

[fishnet]

Google comes from US so in your example, it will only see the US version.
Multilingual means language, not country. Ask someone from Suisse which language he needs, you will get 3 answers

[noRiddle (revilonetz)]

Not quite right.
If you use the hreflang-attribute Google understands that you over different languages for different countries.

To direct users directly to the appropriate language you can read out the
$_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE']
which embodies the language settings in which a user has configured his browser. It is of course not always suitable since a user might set his prefered language in the browser to another language than the country he lives in or even than his preferred language. For most cases though it should be applicable.

Please use your preferred search engine to find out more about $_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE'] and how to read it out.

Cheers,
noRiddle

[fishnet]

$_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE']

is more about their language than about their country, isn't it ? 

[noRiddle (revilonetz)]

Yes, it is. But there is no other way to accomplish what the OP wants.
Anywayn you can even distinguish between country specific languages like e.g.

• de for general german
• de-de for greman in Germany,
• de-li for german in Liechtenstein,
• en for general english,
• en-au for australien english
• and so on

So this approach is quite suitable, especially since not many users will set a default language in their browser which doesn't suit them.

Cheers,
noRiddle

[papalife]

How can I have this structure

www.mydomain.com/en
www.mydomain.com/de
www.mydomain.com/gr

I have my general website under www.example.com and the subfolders are the languages(same but translated website) but how can this be done practically and for every language have other meta data ?

Kind regards,
Apo

[noRiddle (revilonetz)]

You may create virtual subfolders for each language (you have to change the links behind the flags, or what ever you use for language switching, to direct to these virtual subfolders).
In your htaccess file you do an internal redirect to the query string.
That may look s.th. like this:

Code: PHP  [Auswählen]

## *** BOC internally redirect from virtual language subfolder to query string, noRiddle ***
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^(en|de)/(.*)$  $2?language=$1 [QSA,L]
## *** EOC internally redirect from virtual language subfolder to query string ***

Probably there is a bit more to change in some parts of the core code, I didn't try this in a modified-shop yet but I realized it on other websites I programmed myself.

Considering meta tags:
If you have properly installed your languages you should have input fields for each language automatically.

Cheers,
noRiddle