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It seems that most of the websites which handle currencies keep track of the current currency throughout the user browser session and not through the URL itself. This way, when sharing the URL with friends, the content might not be the same since the browser session will be different.

What do you think is the best practice to handle the URL of a website with multiple currencies? A different currency denotes different content hence my opinion is that it should be embedded within the URL itself, similarly to how one would embed the current language parameter within the URL or sub domain.

What would you think is the best option?

  • Querystring parameter appended to each page, e.g. /en/my-page/?currency=USD
  • URL folder, e.g. /en/USD/my-pages/

Anything else?

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  • Are you talking about a product site with product prices that can be in different currencies?
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    Commented Jan 9, 2014 at 10:46
  • What if a US user sends to a EU user, and they are both registered with their favorite currency? Wouldn't the EU user wish to see prices in euros? Maybe you can have a query parameter, but also allow the user's profile to override it.
    – Chloe
    Commented Jan 10, 2014 at 1:06
  • Its a holiday property rental site, which offers prices in multiple currencies. @Chloe, in that case, the user will just have to click on the currency selection menu and change the currency to his choice of preference.
    – markcassar
    Commented Jan 10, 2014 at 9:15

2 Answers 2

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Rather than build pages around currencies, build pages for users from different countries. See: How should I structure my URLs for both SEO and localization? Google allows sites with substantially the same content if they are targeted at users from different countries.

The targeted country should be part of the host name or folder structure, not a URL parameter. So your website should have sections like:

  • /en/us/my-pages/
  • /en/gb/my-pages/
  • /fr/fr/my-pages/

Where you change not only the currency, but the language of the page when appropriate.

When you do this, make sure you register each folder in Google Webmaster Tools and set the geo-targeting for each folder.

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  • Ideally yes, but what if for example we will offer website only in English, but then would want to offer the possibility to view prices in multiple currencies, e.g. GBP, EUR, USD etc.? What would you suggest in that case as per URL structure?
    – markcassar
    Commented Jan 13, 2014 at 11:22
  • I would still recommend creating a section per English speaking country rather than per currency.
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    Commented Jan 13, 2014 at 11:52
  • So what would you suggest? something like /en/USD/ or /en/EUR/ etc.. Cause we will only have one language which is British English but then users can choose to keep same language and just change the currency
    – markcassar
    Commented Jan 13, 2014 at 14:58
  • /en/us/ and en/gb -- don't put currencies in the URLs. Use countries instead.
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    Commented Jan 13, 2014 at 15:10
  • But currencies are not just country based, currencies are shared between several countries, so for example in case for EUR which is shared by most of the EU member countries, what would you suggest? Creating a URL for all the different countries when no country specific content apart from the currency is made available?
    – markcassar
    Commented Jan 14, 2014 at 9:28
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Throughout our research on this topic, we have found out that it is important to make sure to avoid duplicate content on page. If when toggling the currency choice, the only change in content is the price values of the items, then that can be considered as duplicate content for search engines and if you have multiple users linking to different currency versions of your same page, you can be losing out on link juice.

For this reason, it seems to be ideal to initially set the currency selection through a querystring variable which then stores the user preference in session or cookie. Apart from that, it is idea if you set the canonical URL of the page to be one version of the page, such as in the default currency.

This makes sure that if somebody links to the page in any of the currency, the link juice is all transferred to the same default currency page and not distributed between multiple version.

More information on this as per the article on http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3165033.htm.

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