I'm working on a website for Canada which will have French
and English
versions. For SEO
purposes, I would like to avoid using any language tag in URLs
because I believe it will have more impact (e.g. example.ca/products
better than en.example.ca/products
or example.ca/en/products
).
I believe this is technically possible because the2 languages are sufficiently different that the URLs
won't be conflicting with one another (e.g. if you want a "product" page, it will be /products
in English, and /produits
in French so you know which language the URL
is about).
Since Google
(and most likely others) doesn't rely on the URL
(nor HTML
tags) to determine the content language I don't see any problems with search engines.
To make this possible I've thought about using a cookie
distinct from the session cookie (e.g. example.org_language
) with long term expiry (e.g. N
years) that will memorize the language chosen by the user. That way when people visit the website with a new browser session, they get served the proper language.
I have already given up on users being able to switch one page from English
to French
: when people will chose English
or French
from the menu they will be redirected to the corresponding version of the home page.
Do you foresee any problems with not using a language
component in the URL
(whether domain or path)? (as long as one makes sure URLS
don't conflict).
URLs
to be like phrases, so the combination of words will be unique per language. After posting my question I just realized that for new visitors coming to the home page from search engines, I will have no way of differentiating the 2 languages as theURL
will be the same for both (i.e./
) and the user won't be sending thelanguage cookie
:( Back to the drawing board...