Hot answers tagged internationalization
4
I would suggest utilizing a 301 redirect to a new subdomain location. Subdirectories aren't handled as well from an SEO perspective, and it also diminishes the geo-focus of a site.
I say this based off of practice, lest you wonder.
Another question is where the hosting is occurring for the international domains? Do you have them hosted in those countries ...
4
I can't tell you what the consequences of this will be for sure but I think you can do this and reasonably manage your rankings if you follow best practices.
If possible do a 301 redirect from the old URLs to the new URLs. This means for each and every page. This will let the search engines, and users, know the page has moved and let them know the location ...
4
Looking at the wikipedia page on IP Addresses:
The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) manages the IP address
space allocations globally and delegates five regional Internet
registries (RIRs) to allocate IP address blocks to local Internet
registries (Internet service providers) and other entities.
I'm no expert, but what I think that ...
3
Wherever feasible, ccTLDs should be first preference. Google recognise them and try to target a site accordingly.
User preference should be considered too, as users in some countries exhibit strong preferences for sites on their own ccTLD. For example, a "survey conducted by AFNIC in June 2010 showed a marked preference among French people for .fr domain ...
3
There is a free version of a GeoIP database available from Software77. In their FAQ page they say:
We cannot add or remove IPs from the database. The process we use is automated and the IPs in the database are as as we get them from the various registries around the world. If a registry does not list an IP the only way to get it in our database is for ...
3
The short answer is "it depends", mostly on what you're going to do with it.
Looking at the spec for RFC3987 Internationalized Resource Identifiers, IE is well within it's rights to encode your URLs, especially if you've got a US/UK keyboard assigned where entering an é might not be the simplest of actions for the user...
On top of that, I've seen servers ...
3
After reading Christofian's answer, I did some research and found out that the five Regional Internet Registry members (APNIC, AFRINIC, ARIN, RIPE, and LACNIC) each maintain a copy of the allocated IP address ranges and the associated countries on their public FTP servers. This information is updated daily and mirrored between the five servers.
For example, ...
3
Use numbers only. I've seen Russian, Chinese, and other non-Roman language sites take this approach. Presenting Roman captures is unwise, as it's not safe to assume that mangled alien characters will be legible to non-native speakers. (I find them hard to decipher at the best of times.)
You might also consider omitting CAPTCHAs altogether by using a service ...
3
The W3C provides this very long guide on choosing language tags/subtags.
The important bits:
Language tag syntax is defined by the IETF's BCP 47. In the past it
was necessary to consult lists of codes in various ISO standards to
find the right subtags, but now you only need to look in the IANA
Language Subtag Registry. We will describe the new ...
3
I don't think reinventing the wheel is the right path.
There are a lot of standards currently on use. I think if you wanna markup your elements correctly, start from the basis: there is a global HTML attribute named lang for this purpose.
<html lang='de-de'>
<html lang='en-us'>
...
for an element only
<html lang='pt-br'>
...
...
3
What you're looking for is called Punycode. You can do pretty much any Unicode character with it, I believe.
Verisign have a nifty conversion tool here.
In your scenario, mjölk.com translates to xn--mjlk-6qa.com - xn--mjlk-6qa.com is the domain you'll need to register and the DNS entries you'll need to create if you want that IDN.
(You can try this in ...
3
Not a complete list:
USA
Canada
Australia
China (PRC)
Mexico
Malaysia
Italy (strictly speaking; we don't collect Italian provinces and I don't think we've ever had a problem with sending mail there)
To the best of my knowledge no other European country requires states/provinces in addresses.
Also see ...
3
I have localized sites in English for US/UK/AU/IN, in Spanish for ES/MX and in Portuguese for PT/BR. I would recommend splitting out the localized sites into separate top-level or sub-domains.
You won't get hit with any duplicate content penalties. Google understands when content is localized like this and allows the same content on multiple sites.
When ...
2
I don't know that there are any. WordPress and Drupal, two popular examples, both have modules to account for translation into Korean. You might also be interested in the book CJKV Information Processing, reputedly a great book on Asian-language i18n.
2
Since your site appears to serve country-specific information at different URLs, you could provide a sitemap to help search engines discover them all. Just make sure you don't block access to any countries due to the assumptions you make based on IP. Always give the user (or in this case, Web crawler) the option to choose a different country.
2
Using <html lang="fr-FR"> and <html lang="fr-CA"> is fine, if they correspond to the actual content. But they are ignored by search engines, just as <html lang="fr"> is.
HTML5 does not mean to change the use of language codes. The system of the codes as defined in BCP 47 and extensions to it is very elaborate and lets you specify a ...
2
[This isn't my strongest area, so I'm just citing documentation here, but it seems you've overlooked something.]
The HTML5 spec requires[your link] that the lang value be a valid BCP 47 tag. In that document, the relevant bit seems to be in section 3.4:
For example, an implementation could map the extended language ranges to basic ranges. Another ...
2
You'd think the International Standards Organisation would do this, but no, its, you guessed it WIKIPEDIA!
Why this should be the case is a mystery, but here you are. It even offers the lists in machine readable formats if you have a look around.
List of sovereign states and dependent territories by continent
Currencies to ISO 4217
Countries to ISO ...
2
You should add canonical links to both the .co.uk and the .com site, with the canonical link pointing to the .com site content.
You should then also add rel="alternative" links to all of the .com pages indicating that uk content exists.
for example:
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="http://www.example.co.uk/path" />
the ref="alternative" ...
2
It depends on the context and characters used.
Domain names
Domain names that use non-ASCII characters are known as Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs). They are encoded using Punycode into the ASCII character set. This is to maintain compatibility with older networking software that doesn't understand Unicode.
For example, I have registered a domain ...
2
When you type an IDN for a non-IDN-supported TLD, FireFox goes and converts it into punycode instantly. Try it yourself: http://español.com/ 1 - you'll see it takes you to a parked domain.
This indicates that yes, you can register the punycode against the registrar and it will work, but perhaps not as you intended.
1SE's markup doesn't detect IDN urls, so ...
2
You shouldn't use geo ip as the primary way to switch locales. My primary language is spanish. If I travel to Germany and try to use a page who selects the locale based on the ip, I end up looking to a webpage in german...
The locale selection order should be
url (?land=es) - and persist with a cookie.
browser headers (Accept-Language: es; q=1.0, en; ...
1
Don't use sub-domains. Alternative 1 would be good because Google recognizes the country specific TLD domains such as .fr for France and that domain and it's pages have a better chance of ranking higher in France.
In Alternative 2 if you use this method and each sub folder such as /fr has the language of that index and it's sub pages set to <META ...
1
I agree with what @The Disintegrator said, but I have had the situation where a client insisted on using geoIP as the primary targeting tool. In this case, set up a dev version of the site and switch the result variable so you can see it locally. For example, if you're in the states and you want to see what users in China will see, switch the "if user is in ...
1
I compiled a small SQLite database from the data found over at (Oct 2011): http://www.maxmind.com/app/geolite
4.9MB 7zip file of the database can be downloaded from: http://db.tt/OSXRYfU0
Looks like pulling from the ARIN data like Nick suggested might be a better long-term solution.
1
It's hard to say without taking a deep dive into your analytics and other data, but here's where I would start looking to pinpoint the problem.
It's typical to see a slight drop in long tail when you move a site and redirect. This is because Google is indexing the new pages and updating accordingly. Additionally 301's are best practice if you have to move ...
1
It seems you can config ckeditor to preserves non-ascii characters as text:
http://docs.cksource.com/ckeditor_api/symbols/CKEDITOR.config.html#.entities
http://docs.cksource.com/ckeditor_api/symbols/src/core_config.js.html
1
.com remains the most prominent international TLD. TLDs like .info all feel a bit ... spammy. You may be able to overcome that but if you can find a suitable available .com, go with it!
.net may also work (although not nearly as good as .com).
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