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I'm currently building a website that is not targeted to an English speaking audience. So my thoughts are that if I were to make the URLs in the language of choice (in this case Spanish) then would this help or hinder my SEO for the website? Is it always better to have english URL paths for getting picked up by search engines?

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If the site is targeted at Spanish users then you should only use Spanish on the site. That includes the URLs. – Rincewind42 Jul 3 '11 at 7:43

migrated from stackoverflow.com Jul 3 '11 at 7:26

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Te advice i have received by our SEO consultants has always been to to internationalize URLS, files, names, image names and alt tags.

This proves a bit of a challenge on multi-language site. If you have a multi-language site, be careful that the language switch, defaults to the correct language for robots or your site cound be index in a secondary language.

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Your second statement would only apply to multi-language sites where the navigation was translated but the content remained the same. In such cases you would have two copies of the same content - bad SEO. However, if your sites content is fully translated into the other language then you want the search engines to index both versions of the site. – Rincewind42 Jul 3 '11 at 7:42
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If you are targeting only one language then definitely user URLs that use that language. Keywords in URLs is definitely a ranking factor and one of the more heavier weighted ones. Making your URLs in English would only hurt your SEO efforts as you would be optimizing for a language that your site would not be geared towards.

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