Unifying website content under multilingual templates

Unifying website content under multilingual templates - A new solution for localized templates

Google is taking next step and on 9th Sep/2010, Google introduced rel="alternate" which will help webmasters to have better targeting towards multilingual or international audience. It is a new solution for localized templates. It is strongly recommended that:

·         One piece of content should be associated with one URL. If you are using same url for serving content in different languages based on IP delivery then it will really become difficult for bots to understand what to index?

·         It will be advisable to indicate country code eg: EN, FR etc in url when you are dealing with multi lingual web site

If you have a global site containing pages where the: template (i.e. side navigation, footer) is machine-translated into various languages, main content remains unchanged, creating largely duplicate pages, and sometimes search results direct users to the wrong language, we’d like to help you better target your international/multilingual audience through:

<link rel=”alternate” hreflang="a-different-language" href="http://url-of-the-different-language-page" />

Source Google: unifying website content under multilingual templates

STEPS:

Step 1: Select the "canonical". The canonical designates the version of your content you’d like indexed and returned to users. Once you have the canonical URL picked out, you can either:

A. 301 (permanent redirect) from the language variants to the canonical.

B. 301 (permanent redirect) from the various localized pages to the canonical URL.

Step 2: In the canonical URL, specify the various language versions via the rel=”alternate” link tag, using its hreflang attribute. Implementing below mentioned tags on http://es.example.com/javier-lopez will ensure that

French user will get French copy and English user will get English copy

<link rel=”alternate” hreflang="en" href="http://en.example.com/javier-lopez" />

<link rel=”alternate” hreflang="fr" href="http://fr.example.com/javier-lopez" />

In case you have any queries for "Using rel=alternate for translated template pages" then you can visit: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=7a2e69b904c7f125&hl=en