Multilingual site, links to homepage

Question

Basically, I have two sites, each for separate language:

• example.com (for EN readers)
• example.pl (for pl_PL readers)

Data on these sites is not exactly the same, so I cannot link one subpage from language 1 to another in language 2 (example.pl/article1.html → example.com/article2.html) as there can be no relation at all (different content, different targets, but the same company). Let's say we target two regions with our sites.

We want to have link in the header to point to the homepage of opposite language site. On example.com we want to have link to example.pl and vice versa. What is the best approach to not affect SEO?

Curently, we just pointed it like <a href="http://example.com">xxx</a> and Google shouts at as that that we have many points from one site to another - we have a lot of subpages on both sites.

Answer 1

There is a key concept for handling multilingual sites that follow good SEO practices: Alternate href tag

Between your multilingual sites, you need to tell search engines which page from language A is the translated version with language. In your case you can just specify both domains alternate tags languages in homepages, and better yet, each page translated version accross each domain e.g.

example.com/foobar
example.com.pl/foobarpl

Would need something like this in both webpages headers:

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="http://example.com/foobar" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="pl" href="http://example.com/foobarpl" />

You can do this in your webpage header or sitemap. Read more about it here: Use hreflang for language and regional URLs

You should also keep and eye on duplicated content, i.e. canonical tags.

Answer 2

If content is totally different, then I don't think you should linked them anyway.

You can't use hreflang, because your content is not same in different languages.

Google don't like if any Webmaster play with PageRank, let's take example, how same company maintain it's ranking for different region.

Matt Cutts Suggests, don't placed many links on footer or navigation like, www.example.com, www.example.pl, www.example.in, www.example.de It's looks spammy, because more Pagerank is passed to those links. Instead use HTML sitemap, and list them your all sites with country flag, so user can navigate it more easily, and less PR will flow. In reality those sites are same for different country, but to maintain it's position, Google allowed to link them, but not to influence ranking.

I suggest to use Google Webmaster Tools, and Specify your Geo target.