Bilingual site

[jocelyn]

My site is bilingual, but only some pages have both languages like the homepage, links...
Having alien words for both french and english text is bad for the content no ?
Should I do subdomains stuff to have 2 different index page being crawled... or just subdirs or even something even easier I don't think of ?
Since all pages have a link to the other language page, subdomains would mean crosslinking no ?
Basically all my links point to the actual index.html and I would have to keep it and link to the french and english subdomains. A 301 would benefit only one of the language page subdomain.
1/3 of my trafic comes from my home page. This could mean super drop or super boost... I mean anchor texts... will not back the new one language index pages of the subdomains in the SERPS. And splitting the PR among the 3 sites (actual, french, english) might not be that good of an idea.
Doing this, I would still need a shorter 2 language homepage with only one link to both sections...
Maybe it's just easier to make and add an english page (weaker rankings) and slam a big ENGLISH button on the french one. Then get links for the new page.
This is a tricky one that I been thinking for a while and basically endup to square one.

Your toughts on this would help me a lot.

[seo guy]

http://www.cribbage.ca/
Jocelyn, first off let me say that I do not recommend going the sub domain route, you are effectively reducing your sites reputation as you know Google treats sub domains as individual domains and thus you will not get credit for having a larger site, you will have 2 small ones. It is becoming increasingly more important to have a lot of decent content that is relevant on your website and of course lots of pages so this is why I suggest not splitting them up. By keeping them all on the same domain you are able to increase page count which will increase what I like to call your “amazon factor” The amazon factor basically addresses the fact that amazon can rank on the first page for any keyword instantly just by publishing a page, the reason for this is because their site has such an established reputation which includes among other things, PR, Page count and topically related content. So my vote is to keep it all on the same route with no subs.

How would I do this? Organizationally I would go with subfolders (Directories) one for English one for French. You have pretty much don’t this but skipped the directory bit and gone straight to static pages within the root such as http://www.cribbage.ca/enregistrement.htm

My only change if I was designing from scratch is to have directories for organization such as
http://www.cribbage.ca/english-games/
http://www.cribbage.ca/francais-video-pc/
Something like that I have no idea how to suggest the French equivalent.

So my link would look like http://www.cribbage.ca//francais-video-pc/enregistrement.htm as opposed to the link quoted above, however the way you have it will certainly not hurt you, I just prefer this way for organizing.

I like how you have not tried to cross link the English with the French sides, that is good the only thing I would have is a link to Francais Version | English Version so the main pages of the directories were re included a little more in your linking architecture.

I cant make to many suggestions for your French side, but what are the main keywords you would like to target for http://www.cribbage.ca/english.htm perhaps I can make some more suggestions for you my friend.

Either way I hope this helps answer your question a little more, and for the other members viewing, the most important thing to take out of this is to not divide your sites content into subdomains, keep them all on the one site and use an organized directory structure
Cheers

[jocelyn]

Thanks for confirming my toughts about the subdomain thing. I always used subfolders for this 2 smaller site reason.

My english page got kicked in the balls by florida. It's been useless since then and now it only ranks for 'crossword puzzle maker' and some combinations of it. It's trafic is low. The french version of it is my best visitor grabber after my homepage.

Every french and english pages are linked together with the button on the upper right corner. Did that because I saw a lot of hits from google-translation. Translations are always bad.

About home. I guess I should do like I said and strip the english content and put it on an other page, put a link to it from the french home with my best english hits in the anchor and around it for proximity. Then get links exchanged from english sites to point to the new english page.

Thanks for the recommendations and other suggestions are welcome.

[jocelyn]

Ok took a few minutes to do some changes... what ever happens, happens.

My home is now french with a link to a new english section index.

I should kick some butts on the french side and drop on the english out... hopefully for a while only.

I'll really have to do someting with my menu system. I'm not too hot on HTML coding and pulldowns, design... more stuff I add to it, worse it gets.

[serious]

Don't mean to intrude on your thread but seo guy you mention google treats subdomains as different domains, do you mean different domains entirely, or "sort of" different domains.

What im wondering is if you set up several sites on the same domain using subdomains, each with different topics, could you get around the reciprocal linking "dilemma" using only one domain?

I think I am having trouble putting the question into the proper words...

The reason I am wondering is I am working on a small project which sells ebooks of varying topics, would I be better off using subdomains, unique domains for each, or just one domain, keeping in mind that each book will have about 50 or so pages of real information content not just a salespage.

Does this make any sense? :eek:

[serious]

i'm sorry jocelyn i wasn't planning on such a drawn out question, i should have made a new thread.

[seo guy]

No problem Serious,

The answer is keep everything on the same domain, the reason is you get more of a ranking benefit from having a larger site, then having many small sites linked together. Also with many small sites, some editor at Google could be having a bad day and ban you (its excuse enough) Finally your efforts for backlinks would be severely diluted, you would have to get links from other sites to each of your subs instead of just one main page.

With just one main site, the ranking benefit translates to all the internal pages without haveing to get links to those pages specifically.

Your questions is not out of place nor is it an intrusion, this is exactly what forums are for, to discuss, and sometimes one things brings up some question or point about another. This is how we learn :-)

[jocelyn]

It treats them as different domains. This is why I mention the crosslinks of doing this because of my french and english pages being linked together.
Crosslinking is bad and this is why you endup looking for links for both sites.

[serious]

thank you for the info, my original plan was to do it all under one domain from the start, but I wasn't sure if there would be a better option.

I wouldn't mind buying new domains for each book, but I guess that would turn this into a much larger project.

Now I just have to decide what to do with the mainpage, since it will only be a portal to the different mini sites I will probably try to fix it so that most links point to the homepage of the minisites rather than the regular domain.

[jocelyn]

Just tought of someting. Since I'll be fooling around with my site, I'll post the results. Now all I did was cut the english stuff of my home, made a english page with the text and put it in a subfolder. Changed my menu system a bit to send PR juice toward it. Tonight it should be crawled.

Now I will move some of my low trafic pages in the subfolder soon.

I will rename the files with _ to - since I missread a post when I was a newbie and only used underscores. If I'm gonna 301 a file, might as well do it once and for all.

Any test suggestion or whatever... let me know.

[jocelyn]

Had a look at my logs. Googlebot chewed the new version of home page and the 2 new subdir index pages.

64.68.82.57 [29/May/2004:22:40:30 -0500] GET /english-games/ HTTP/1.0" 200 13451 ...
64.68.82.170 [29/May/2004:23:48:02 -0500] GET /francais-jeux-pc/ HTTP/1.0" 200 14191 ...

So we'll see how long it takes to get in the SERPS and to see the home changes. The file francais-jeux-pc is only linked from english-games so far.

[Cyber-SEO]

I'm also waiting to see how my new site does with my category structure. i did the same thing you are doing there with www.knivefactory.com, i think it should do well as soon as it comes out of the sandbox. Its 1 month old site right now and is doing ok with the traffic.

[jocelyn]

Ok already found a SERP for my new french page #19 for 'cartes jeux'

http://www.google.com/search?q=cartes+jeux&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&c2coff=1&start=10&sa=N

Thank was quick...

[zagro]

Hi Jocelyn,

Regarding sites in other languages than english... what do we do with graphical accents?
Do search engines read #233; or é? Do they index differently "cafe" and "café" or "cafe"? do people use them when searching?
(please tell me if I'm not being clear here and I'll reformulate the question, I think it is an important issue for some of us... Julian, tu puedes ayudarme?('Julian, can you help?'))
thanks

[jocelyn]

[QUOTE=zagro]Hi Jocelyn,

Regarding sites in other languages than english... what do we do with graphical accents?
Do search engines read #233; or é? Do they index differently "cafe" and "café" or "cafe"? do people use them when searching?[/QUOTE]
It will treat the é as a e. But if the search was with a é, more weight is given to the exact match. People search both versions, making it harder. It's a pain in the butt like the plurial and singular...

[do it sites]

Jocelyn or SEO Guy,

How does forwarding a domain name to inter pages of a site come into play here?

I have some were the actual page name is an extention of the main domain, but have another domain name that points to that same page.

Will this still get indexed?

Do It,

Mike

[jocelyn]

If you do a redirect (301) no problem.
If you do an HTML refresh tag... not too good.
If you are linked from a good page somewhere, you will get indexed.
The higher the PR of the page the link is on, the faster.

Like my new subdir addition. Two days after it was ranking. It's still there. #14 on 2,050,000 docs.
If it's the new page favor treatment, It should disapear higher in SERPS soon.
I should get sandboxed if it's about new pages.

[smindsrt]

I will soon add a new language to my web site (spanish). I have read this posting and want to confirm that I should use a top level url like: www.desertmedicalessentials.com/spanish.php (URL not working yet) Will this work ok? Is this the best place for the new language?

For PR purpose when I get ready where should spanish links point to? My engilsh home page or my spanish home page?

Any suggestions would be helpful.

Thank you!

Desert Medical Essentials (http://www.desertmedicalessentials.com) - Medical Equipment and Supplies