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I'm creating a translation web service, and wondering which approach will be better in terms of SEO. The app will allow users to translate between English, Spanish and French, using two select fields on the page (For "Source" and "Target" language options). Here are the two options that I see:

Option 1

Have one UCR and Page title for all translation options, like so:

  • url: example.com/translate. Page title: "Translate between English, Spanish and French".

Option 2

Have the page title and the select fields change based on the urls. Examples of what I mean:

  • url: example.com/translate?english-to-french. Page title: "Translate English to French".
  • url: example.com/translate?spanish-to-english. Page title: "Translate Spanish to English".

The "selected" option in the select fields will also change based on the URL parameters, with a total of 6 variants of the same page, and then I can let Google fetch these pages as different pages.

Which one will be better in terms of SEO?

PS: I plan on having several different languages, but have only given 3 for the sake of brevity.

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  • "variants of the same page" based on URL parameters are all different pages from the perspective of crawlers and search engines.
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    Commented Sep 14, 2020 at 11:45

1 Answer 1

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It's definitely a good idea to ensure that each unique URL points to a document with:

  • a unique <title>
  • a unique <meta name="description">
  • a unique set of <meta name="keywords"> (ignore the naysayers who encourage you to ignore this: optimising for Google isn't the beginning and the end of optimising for search, indexing and categorisation)
  • a unique <h1> top level heading

That said, these URLs:

  • mysite.com/translate?english-to-french
  • mysite.com/translate?spanish-to-english

aren't unique URLs. They're the same URL with different query-strings.

I'd suggest using something like this instead:

  • mysite.com/translate/english/french/
  • mysite.com/translate/spanish/english/
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  • 1
    Yes, I plan on changing everything on the page dynamically based on the url. Thanks for the url pattern suggestion, I'd go for that if I choose this route. However, I'm still not sure whether I should have different urls for this service, or have everything in one place (Option 1). Could you share your thoughts on which approach is better?
    – Sameer Zahid
    Commented Sep 14, 2020 at 11:50
  • For SEO, there is no question - if you want multiple URLs to be indexed and returned for searches, you must build a website with multiple URLs. That's not to say that mysite.com/translate/english/french/ can't internally redirect to mysite.com/translate?english-to-french invisibly, behind the scenes, but it must be known to the world as mysite.com/translate/english/french/.
    – Rounin
    Commented Sep 22, 2020 at 9:57

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