Création des Logiciels de gestion d'Entreprise, Création et référencement des sites web, Réseaux et Maintenance, Conception
from web contents: How search results may differ based on accented characters and interface languages 2013
salam every one, this is a topic from google web master centrale blog:
When a searcher enters a query that includes a word with accented characters, our algorithms consider web pages that contain versions of that word both with and without the accent. For instance, if a searcher enters [México], we'll return results for pages about both "Mexico" and "México."
Conversely, if a searcher enters a query without using accented characters, but a word in that query could be spelled with them, our algorithms consider web pages with both the accented and non-accented versions of the word. So if a searcher enters [Mexico], we'll return results for pages about both "Mexico" and "México."
How the searcher's interface language comes into play
The searcher's interface language is taken into account during this process. For instance, the set of accented characters that are treated as equivalent to non-accented characters varies based on the searcher's interface language, as language-level rules for accenting differ.
Also, documents in the chosen interface language tend to be considered more relevant. If a searcher's interface language is English, our algorithms assume that the queries are in English and that the searcher prefers English language documents returned.
This means that the search results for the same query can vary depending on the language interface of the searcher. They can also vary depending on the location of the searcher (which is based on IP address) and if the searcher chooses to see results only from the specified language. If the searcher has personalized search enabled, that will also influence the search results.
The example below illustrates the results returned when a searcher queries [Mexico] with the interface language set to Spanish.
Note that when the interface language is set to Spanish, more results with accented characters are returned, even though the query didn't include the accented character.
How to restrict search results
To obtain search results for only a specific version of the word (with or without accented characters), you can place a + before the word. For instance, the search [+Mexico] returns only pages about "Mexico" (and not "México"). The search [+México] returns only pages about "México" and not "Mexico." Note that you may see some search results that don't appear to use the version of word you specified in your query, but that version of the word may appear within the content of the page or in anchor text to the page, rather than in the title or description listed in the results. (You can see the top anchor text used to link to your site by choosing Statistics > Page analysis in webmaster tools.)
The example below illustrates the results returned when a searcher queries [+Mexico].
this is a topic published in 2013... to get contents for your blog or your forum, just contact me at: devnasser@gmail.com
Conversely, if a searcher enters a query without using accented characters, but a word in that query could be spelled with them, our algorithms consider web pages with both the accented and non-accented versions of the word. So if a searcher enters [Mexico], we'll return results for pages about both "Mexico" and "México."
How the searcher's interface language comes into play
The searcher's interface language is taken into account during this process. For instance, the set of accented characters that are treated as equivalent to non-accented characters varies based on the searcher's interface language, as language-level rules for accenting differ.
Also, documents in the chosen interface language tend to be considered more relevant. If a searcher's interface language is English, our algorithms assume that the queries are in English and that the searcher prefers English language documents returned.
This means that the search results for the same query can vary depending on the language interface of the searcher. They can also vary depending on the location of the searcher (which is based on IP address) and if the searcher chooses to see results only from the specified language. If the searcher has personalized search enabled, that will also influence the search results.
The example below illustrates the results returned when a searcher queries [Mexico] with the interface language set to Spanish.
Note that when the interface language is set to Spanish, more results with accented characters are returned, even though the query didn't include the accented character.
How to restrict search results
To obtain search results for only a specific version of the word (with or without accented characters), you can place a + before the word. For instance, the search [+Mexico] returns only pages about "Mexico" (and not "México"). The search [+México] returns only pages about "México" and not "Mexico." Note that you may see some search results that don't appear to use the version of word you specified in your query, but that version of the word may appear within the content of the page or in anchor text to the page, rather than in the title or description listed in the results. (You can see the top anchor text used to link to your site by choosing Statistics > Page analysis in webmaster tools.)
The example below illustrates the results returned when a searcher queries [+Mexico].
from web contents: Better geographic choices for webmasters 2013
salam every one, this is a topic from google web master centrale blog: Written by Amanda Camp, Webmaster Tools and Trystan Upstill, International Search Quality Team
Starting today Google Webmaster Tools helps you better control the country association of your content on a per-domain, per-subdomain, or per-directory level. The information you give us will help us determine how your site appears in our country-specific search results, and also improves our search results for geographic queries.
We currently only allow you to associate your site with a single country and location. If your site is relevant to an even more specific area, such as a particular state or region, feel free to tell us that. Or let us know if your site isn't relevant to any particular geographic location at all. If no information is entered in Webmaster Tools, we'll continue to make geographic associations largely based on the top-level domain (e.g. .co.uk or .ca) and the IP of the webserver from which the context was served.
For example, if we wanted to associate www.google.com with Hungary:
But you don't want www.google.com/webmasters/tools" associated with any country...
This feature is restricted for sites with a country code top level domain, as we'll always associate that site with the country domain. (For example, google.ru will always be the version of Google associated with Russia.)
Note that in the same way that Google may show your business address if you register your brick-and-mortar business with the Google Local Business Center, we may show the information that you give us publicly.
This feature was largely initiated by your feedback, so thanks for the great suggestion. Google is always committed towards helping more sites and users get better and more relevant results. This is a new step as we continue to think about how to improve searches around the world.
We encourage you to tell us what you think in the Webmaster Tools section of our discussion group.this is a topic published in 2013... to get contents for your blog or your forum, just contact me at: devnasser@gmail.com
Starting today Google Webmaster Tools helps you better control the country association of your content on a per-domain, per-subdomain, or per-directory level. The information you give us will help us determine how your site appears in our country-specific search results, and also improves our search results for geographic queries.
We currently only allow you to associate your site with a single country and location. If your site is relevant to an even more specific area, such as a particular state or region, feel free to tell us that. Or let us know if your site isn't relevant to any particular geographic location at all. If no information is entered in Webmaster Tools, we'll continue to make geographic associations largely based on the top-level domain (e.g. .co.uk or .ca) and the IP of the webserver from which the context was served.
For example, if we wanted to associate www.google.com with Hungary:
But you don't want www.google.com/webmasters/tools" associated with any country...
This feature is restricted for sites with a country code top level domain, as we'll always associate that site with the country domain. (For example, google.ru will always be the version of Google associated with Russia.)
Note that in the same way that Google may show your business address if you register your brick-and-mortar business with the Google Local Business Center, we may show the information that you give us publicly.
This feature was largely initiated by your feedback, so thanks for the great suggestion. Google is always committed towards helping more sites and users get better and more relevant results. This is a new step as we continue to think about how to improve searches around the world.
We encourage you to tell us what you think in the Webmaster Tools section of our discussion group.this is a topic published in 2013... to get contents for your blog or your forum, just contact me at: devnasser@gmail.com
from web contents: 6 Quick Tips for International Websites 2013
salam every one, this is a topic from google web master centrale blog:
Note from the editors: After previously looking into various ways to handle internationalization for Google’s web-search, here’s a post from Google Web Studio team members with tips for web developers.
Many websites exist in more than one language, and more and more websites are made available for more than one language. Yet, building a website for more than one language doesn’t simply mean translation, or localization (L10N), and that’s it. It requires a few more things, all of which are related to internationalization (I18N). In this post we share a few tips for international websites.
Avoid coming up with your own solutions like special classes or IDs.
As for I18N in style sheets, you can’t always rely on CSS: The CSS spec defines that conforming user agents may ignore properties like
So instead of embedding an alternative style sheet like
just use your existing
When taking this approach you’ll need to complement existing CSS rules by their international counterparts:
3. Use the
Since we recommend to stick with the style sheet you have (tip #2), you need a different way of selecting elements you need to style differently for the other directionality. As RTL contents require specific markup (tip #1), this should be easy: For most modern browsers, we can simply use
Here’s an example:
4. Use the
To target documents of a particular language, use the
For example, if you discover that bold formatting doesn’t work very well for Chinese documents (which indeed it does not), use the following:
For example, what’s
There are tools to make it easy to “flip” directionality. One of them is CSSJanus, though it has been written for the “separate style sheet” realm, not the “same style sheet” one.
If you have any questions or feedback, check the Internationalization Webmaster Help Forum, or leave your comments here.
this is a topic published in 2013... to get contents for your blog or your forum, just contact me at: devnasser@gmail.comMany websites exist in more than one language, and more and more websites are made available for more than one language. Yet, building a website for more than one language doesn’t simply mean translation, or localization (L10N), and that’s it. It requires a few more things, all of which are related to internationalization (I18N). In this post we share a few tips for international websites.
1. Make pages I18N-ready in the markup, not the style sheets
Language and directionality are inherent to the contents of the document. If possible you should hence always use markup, not style sheets, for internationalization purposes. Use@lang and @dir, at least on the html element:<html lang="ar" dir="rtl">Avoid coming up with your own solutions like special classes or IDs.
As for I18N in style sheets, you can’t always rely on CSS: The CSS spec defines that conforming user agents may ignore properties like
direction or unicode-bidi. (For XML, the situation changes again. XML doesn’t offer special internationalization markup, so here it’s advisable to use CSS.)2. Use one style sheet for all locales
Instead of creating separate style sheets for LTR and RTL directionality, or even each language, bundle everything in one style sheet. That makes your internationalization rules much easier to understand and maintain.So instead of embedding an alternative style sheet like
<link href="default.rtl.css" rel="stylesheet">just use your existing
<link href="default.css" rel="stylesheet">When taking this approach you’ll need to complement existing CSS rules by their international counterparts:
3. Use the [dir='rtl'] attribute selector
Since we recommend to stick with the style sheet you have (tip #2), you need a different way of selecting elements you need to style differently for the other directionality. As RTL contents require specific markup (tip #1), this should be easy: For most modern browsers, we can simply use [dir='rtl'].Here’s an example:
aside {
float: right;
margin: 0 0 1em 1em;
}
[dir='rtl'] aside {
float: left;
margin: 0 1em 1em 0;
}4. Use the :lang() pseudo class
To target documents of a particular language, use the :lang() pseudo class. (Note that we’re talking documents here, not text snippets, as targeting snippets of a particular language makes things a little more complex.)For example, if you discover that bold formatting doesn’t work very well for Chinese documents (which indeed it does not), use the following:
:lang(zh) strong,
:lang(zh) b {
font-weight: normal;
color: #900;
}5. Mirror left- and right-related values
When working with both LTR and RTL contents it’s important to mirror all the values that change directionality. Among the properties to watch out for is everything related to borders, margins, and paddings, but also position-related properties,float, or text-align.For example, what’s
text-align: left in LTR needs to be text-align: right in RTL.There are tools to make it easy to “flip” directionality. One of them is CSSJanus, though it has been written for the “separate style sheet” realm, not the “same style sheet” one.
6. Keep an eye on the details
Watch out for the following items:- Images designed for left or right, like arrows or backgrounds, light sources in
box-shadowandtext-shadow values, and JavaScript positioning and animations: These may require being swapped and accommodated for in the opposite directionality. - Font sizes and fonts, especially for non-Latin alphabets: Depending on the script and font, the default font size may be too small. Consider tweaking the size and, if necessary, the font.
- CSS specificity: When using the
[dir='rtl'](or[dir='ltr']) hook (tip #2), you’re using a selector of higher specificity. This can lead to issues. Just have an eye out, and adjust accordingly.
If you have any questions or feedback, check the Internationalization Webmaster Help Forum, or leave your comments here.
from web contents: Now you can polish up Google’s translation of your website 2013
salam every one, this is a topic from google web master centrale blog:
Webmaster level: All
(Cross-posted on the Google Translate Blog)
Since we first launched the Website Translator plugin back in September 2009, more than a million websites have added the plugin. While we’ve kept improving our machine translation system since then, we may not reach perfection until someone invents full-blown Artificial Intelligence. In other words, you’ll still sometimes run into translations we didn’t get quite right.
So today, we’re launching a new experimental feature (in beta) that lets you customize and improve the way the Website Translator translates your site. Once you add the customization meta tag to a webpage, visitors will see your customized translations whenever they translate the page, even when they use the translation feature in Chrome and Google Toolbar. They’ll also now be able to ‘suggest a better translation’ when they notice a translation that’s not quite right, and later you can accept and use that suggestion on your site.
To get started:
If you’re signed in, the corrections made on your site will go live right away -- the next time a visitor translates a page on your website, they’ll see your correction. If one of your visitors contributes a better translation, the suggestion will wait until you approve it. You can also invite other editors to make corrections and add translation glossary entries. You can learn more about these new features in the Help Center.
This new experimental feature is currently free of charge. We hope this feature, along with Translator Toolkit and the Translate API, can provide a low cost way to expand your reach globally and help to break down language barriers.
this is a topic published in 2013... to get contents for your blog or your forum, just contact me at: devnasser@gmail.com
Webmaster level: All
(Cross-posted on the Google Translate Blog)
Since we first launched the Website Translator plugin back in September 2009, more than a million websites have added the plugin. While we’ve kept improving our machine translation system since then, we may not reach perfection until someone invents full-blown Artificial Intelligence. In other words, you’ll still sometimes run into translations we didn’t get quite right.
So today, we’re launching a new experimental feature (in beta) that lets you customize and improve the way the Website Translator translates your site. Once you add the customization meta tag to a webpage, visitors will see your customized translations whenever they translate the page, even when they use the translation feature in Chrome and Google Toolbar. They’ll also now be able to ‘suggest a better translation’ when they notice a translation that’s not quite right, and later you can accept and use that suggestion on your site.
To get started:
- Add the Website Translator plugin and customization meta tag to your website
- Then translate a page into one of 60+ languages using the Website Translator
- Hover over a translated sentence to display the original text
- Click on ‘Contribute a better translation’
- And finally, click on a phrase to choose an automatic alternative translation -- or just double-click to edit the translation directly.
If you’re signed in, the corrections made on your site will go live right away -- the next time a visitor translates a page on your website, they’ll see your correction. If one of your visitors contributes a better translation, the suggestion will wait until you approve it. You can also invite other editors to make corrections and add translation glossary entries. You can learn more about these new features in the Help Center.
This new experimental feature is currently free of charge. We hope this feature, along with Translator Toolkit and the Translate API, can provide a low cost way to expand your reach globally and help to break down language barriers.
this is a topic published in 2013... to get contents for your blog or your forum, just contact me at: devnasser@gmail.com
from web contents: Translate your website with Google: Expand your audience globally 2013
salam every one, this is a topic from google web master centrale blog: (This has been cross-posted from the Official Google Blog)
How long would it take to translate all the world's web content into 50 languages? Even if all of the translators in the world worked around the clock, with the current growth rate of content being created online and the sheer amount of data on the web, it would take hundreds of years to make even a small dent.
Today, we're happy to announce a new website translator gadget powered by Google Translate that enables you to make your site's content available in 51 languages. Now, when people visit your page, if their language (as determined by their browser settings) is different than the language of your page, they'll be prompted to automatically translate the page into their own language. If the visitor's language is the same as the language of your page, no translation banner will appear.
After clicking the Translate button, the automatic translations are shown directly on your page.
It's easy to install — all you have to do is cut and paste a short snippet into your webpage to increase the global reach of your blog or website.
Automatic translation is convenient and helps people get a quick gist of the page. However, it's not a perfect substitute for the art of professional translation. Today happens to be International Translation Day, and we'd like to take the opportunity to celebrate the contributions of translators all over the world. These translators play an essential role in enabling global communication, and with the rapid growth and ease of access to digital content, the need for them is greater than ever. We hope that professional translators, along with translation tools such as Google Translator Toolkit and this Translate gadget, will continue to help make the world's content more accessible to everyone.
this is a topic published in 2013... to get contents for your blog or your forum, just contact me at: devnasser@gmail.com
How long would it take to translate all the world's web content into 50 languages? Even if all of the translators in the world worked around the clock, with the current growth rate of content being created online and the sheer amount of data on the web, it would take hundreds of years to make even a small dent.
Today, we're happy to announce a new website translator gadget powered by Google Translate that enables you to make your site's content available in 51 languages. Now, when people visit your page, if their language (as determined by their browser settings) is different than the language of your page, they'll be prompted to automatically translate the page into their own language. If the visitor's language is the same as the language of your page, no translation banner will appear.
After clicking the Translate button, the automatic translations are shown directly on your page.
It's easy to install — all you have to do is cut and paste a short snippet into your webpage to increase the global reach of your blog or website.
Automatic translation is convenient and helps people get a quick gist of the page. However, it's not a perfect substitute for the art of professional translation. Today happens to be International Translation Day, and we'd like to take the opportunity to celebrate the contributions of translators all over the world. These translators play an essential role in enabling global communication, and with the rapid growth and ease of access to digital content, the need for them is greater than ever. We hope that professional translators, along with translation tools such as Google Translator Toolkit and this Translate gadget, will continue to help make the world's content more accessible to everyone.
this is a topic published in 2013... to get contents for your blog or your forum, just contact me at: devnasser@gmail.com
from web contents: Register non-English domain names with Webmaster Tools 2013
salam every one, this is a topic from google web master centrale blog:
I'm happy to announce that Webmaster Tools is expanding support for webmasters outside of the English-speaking world, by supporting Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications (IDNA). IDNA provides a way for site owners to have domains that go beyond the domain name system's limitations of English letters and numbers. Prior to IDNA, Internet host names could only be in the 26 letters of the English alphabet, the numbers 0-9, and the hyphen character. With IDNA support, you'll now be able to add your sites that use other character sets, and organize them easily on your Webmaster Tools Dashboard.
Let's say you wanted to add http://北京大学.cn/ (Peking University) to your Webmaster Tools account before we launched IDNA support. If you typed that in to the "Add Site" box, you'd get back an error message that looks like this:
Some webmasters discovered a workaround. Internally, IDNA converts nicely encoded http://北京大学.cn/ to a format called Punycode, which looks like http://xn--1lq90ic7fzpc.cn/. This allowed them to diagnose and view information about their site, but it looked pretty ugly. Also, if they had more than one IDNA site, you can imagine it would be pretty hard to tell them apart.
Since we now support IDNA throughout Webmaster Tools, all you need to do is type in the name of your site, and we will add it correctly. Here is what it looks like if you attempt to add http://北京大学.cn/ to your account:
If you are one of the webmasters who discovered the workaround previously (i.e., you have had sites listed in your account that look like http://xn--1lq90ic7fzpc.cn/), those sites will now automatically display correctly.
We'd love to hear your questions and feedback on this new feature; you can write a comment below or post in the Google Webmaster Tools section of our Webmaster Help Group. We'd also appreciate suggestions for other ways we can improve our international support.this is a topic published in 2013... to get contents for your blog or your forum, just contact me at: devnasser@gmail.com
I'm happy to announce that Webmaster Tools is expanding support for webmasters outside of the English-speaking world, by supporting Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications (IDNA). IDNA provides a way for site owners to have domains that go beyond the domain name system's limitations of English letters and numbers. Prior to IDNA, Internet host names could only be in the 26 letters of the English alphabet, the numbers 0-9, and the hyphen character. With IDNA support, you'll now be able to add your sites that use other character sets, and organize them easily on your Webmaster Tools Dashboard.
Let's say you wanted to add http://北京大学.cn/ (Peking University) to your Webmaster Tools account before we launched IDNA support. If you typed that in to the "Add Site" box, you'd get back an error message that looks like this:
Some webmasters discovered a workaround. Internally, IDNA converts nicely encoded http://北京大学.cn/ to a format called Punycode, which looks like http://xn--1lq90ic7fzpc.cn/. This allowed them to diagnose and view information about their site, but it looked pretty ugly. Also, if they had more than one IDNA site, you can imagine it would be pretty hard to tell them apart.
Since we now support IDNA throughout Webmaster Tools, all you need to do is type in the name of your site, and we will add it correctly. Here is what it looks like if you attempt to add http://北京大学.cn/ to your account:
If you are one of the webmasters who discovered the workaround previously (i.e., you have had sites listed in your account that look like http://xn--1lq90ic7fzpc.cn/), those sites will now automatically display correctly.
We'd love to hear your questions and feedback on this new feature; you can write a comment below or post in the Google Webmaster Tools section of our Webmaster Help Group. We'd also appreciate suggestions for other ways we can improve our international support.
from web contents: Tips for Eastern European webmasters 2013
salam every one, this is a topic from google web master centrale blog:
In 2006 we ramped up on international webmaster issues and particularly tried to support Eastern Europe. We opened several offices in the region, improved our algorithms with respect to these languages, and localized many of our products. Should I find only one word to describe these markets, I would say they are diverse. Still, they have two things in common: their online markets are currently in a developing phase and a high number of webmasters and search engine optimizers work there in a variety of languages. We are aware that a certain amount of webspam is generated in this region and we would like to reinforce that we have been working hard to take action on it both algorithmically and manually. Since I have seen some common phenomena in a bunch of these markets, here are a couple of suggestions for Eastern European webmasters and SEOs:
this is a topic published in 2013... to get contents for your blog or your forum, just contact me at: devnasser@gmail.com- Avoid link exchanges. If a fellow webmaster approaches you with some sketchy offer, just refuse. Instead, work on the content of your site. Once you have the quality content, you can use the buzzing blogger community and social web services in your language to get nice linkbaits. Creating good content for your language community will pay off. Help the high-quality people in your language community and they will re-power you.
- Use regional and geographical domains in line with their purpose. First, a sidenote for the Western webmasters: some Eastern European countries like Poland and Russia have so-called regional or geographical domains. Imagine that all the states in the U.S. had their official second level domain and if you wanted to open your webshop delivering to Kentucky, you could do it cheap or for free on eg. ky.us. This could help Google serve geographically relevant search results. In case you wish to sell organic soaps to people in Szczecin, do open your webshop on szczecin.pl. If you are from Kalmykia and would like to show the world the beauty of your area, go ahead and set up your Kalmyki travel site on kalmykia.ru. If you like a region, support it by hosting your site on the related regional or geographical domain. Be aware that webspam on these regional domains violates the correct use of them and prevents the development of your country's web culture.
- Say no to Cybersquats! Sneaky registering of strong online brands with Belarusian, Estonian or Slovak top level domains is just bad. While it will not particularly help you boost the ranking of your site, cybersquatting often has created disappointed users and legal actions as side effects.
- Think long-term. You have your share of responsibility for the development of your market. Creating quality sites that target users who search for highly specific content in your particular language will help you get your market into a more mature status -- and mature markets mean mature publisher revenue too.
from web contents: Multilingual and multinational site annotations in Sitemaps 2013
salam every one, this is a topic from google web master centrale blog:
Webmaster level: All
In December 2011 we announced annotations for sites that target users in many languages and, optionally, countries. These annotations define a cluster of equivalent pages that target users around the world, and were implemented using rel-alternate-hreflang link elements in the HTML of each page in the cluster.
Based on webmaster feedback and other considerations, today we’re adding support for specifying the rel-alternate-hreflang annotations in Sitemaps. Using Sitemaps instead of HTML link elements offers many advantages including smaller page size and easier deployment for some websites.
To see how this works, let's take a simple example: We wish to specify that for the URL http://www.example.com/en, targeting English language users, the equivalent URL targeting German language speakers http://www.example.com/de. Up till now, the only way to add such annotation is to use a link element, either as an HTTP header or as HTML elements on both URLs like this:
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="http://www.example.com/en" >
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="de" href="http://www.example.com/de" >As of today, you can alternately use the following equivalent markup in Sitemaps:
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/en</loc>
<xhtml:link
rel="alternate"
hreflang="de"
href="http://www.example.com/de" />
<xhtml:link
rel="alternate"
hreflang="en"
href="http://www.example.com/en" />
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/de</loc>
<xhtml:link
rel="alternate"
hreflang="de"
href="http://www.example.com/de" />
<xhtml:link
rel="alternate"
hreflang="en"
href="http://www.example.com/en" />
</url>
Briefly, the new Sitemaps tags shown in bold function in the same way as the HTML link tags, with both using the same attributes. The full technical details of how the annotations are implemented in Sitemaps, including how to implement the xhtml namespace for the link tag, are in our new Help Center article.
A more detailed example can be found in our new Help Center article, and if you need more help, please ask in our brand new internationalization help forum.
this is a topic published in 2013... to get contents for your blog or your forum, just contact me at: devnasser@gmail.com
from web contents: Watch out for your .yu domain! 2013
salam every one, this is a topic from google web master centrale blog: this is a topic published in 2013... to get contents for your blog or your forum, just contact me at: devnasser@gmail.com
Are you the owner of a .yu domain? Then you might have heard the news: as of September 30, all .yu domains will stop working, regardless of their renewal date. This means that any content you're hosting on a .yu domain will no longer be online. For those of you who would still like to have your site online, we've prepared some recommendations to make sure that Google keeps crawling, indexing, and serving your content appropriately.
- Check your backlinks. Since it won't be possible to set up a redirection from the old .yu domain to your new one, all links pointing to .yu domains will lead to dead ends. This means that it will be increasingly difficult for search engines to retrieve your new content. To find out who is linking to you, sign up with Google Webmaster Tools and check the links to your site (you can also download this list as a "comma separated value" -- .csv -- file for ease of use). Then read through the list for sites that you recognize as important and contact their webmasters to make sure that they update their links to your new website.
- Check your internal links. If you are planning to simply move your content in bulk from the old to the new site, make sure that the new internal navigation is up to date. For example, if you are renaming pages on your site from "www.example.yu/home.htm" to "www.example.com/home.htm" make sure that your internal navigation reflects such changes to prevent broken links.
- Start moving the site to your new domain. It's a good idea to start moving while you can still maintain control of your old domain, so don't wait! As mentioned in our best practices when moving your site, we recommend starting by moving a single directory or subdomain, and testing the results before completing the move. Remember that you will not be able to keep a 301 redirection on your old domain after September 30, so start your test early.
While you're moving your site, you can test how Google crawls and indexes your new site at its new location by submitting a Sitemap via Google Webmaster Tools. Although we may not crawl or index all the pages listed in each Sitemap, we recommend that you submit one because doing so helps Google understand your site better. You can read more on this topic in our answers to the most frequently asked questions on Sitemaps. And remember that for any question or concerns we're waiting for you in the Google Webmaster Help Forum!
Update: as mentioned here, we have introduced a new feature: Change of Address. Check it out if you are moving from one domain to another! By using this feature you will help us update our index faster and hopefully make the transition for your users smoother.
Update: as mentioned here, we have introduced a new feature: Change of Address. Check it out if you are moving from one domain to another! By using this feature you will help us update our index faster and hopefully make the transition for your users smoother.
from web contents: Where in the world is your site? 2013
salam every one, this is a topic from google web master centrale blog:
The Set Geographic Target tool in Webmaster Tools lets you associate your site with a specific region. We've heard a lot of questions from webmasters about how to use the tool, and here Webmaster Trends Analyst Susan Moskwa explains how it works and when to use it.
Want to know more about setting a geographic target for your site? Check out our Help Center. And if you like this video, you can see more on our Webmaster Tools playlist on YouTube.this is a topic published in 2013... to get contents for your blog or your forum, just contact me at: devnasser@gmail.com
The Set Geographic Target tool in Webmaster Tools lets you associate your site with a specific region. We've heard a lot of questions from webmasters about how to use the tool, and here Webmaster Trends Analyst Susan Moskwa explains how it works and when to use it.
The http://www.google.ca/ example in the video is a little hard to see, so here's a screenshot:
Want to know more about setting a geographic target for your site? Check out our Help Center. And if you like this video, you can see more on our Webmaster Tools playlist on YouTube.
from web contents: Working with multilingual websites 2013
salam every one, this is a topic from google web master centrale blog: Webmaster Level: Intermediate
A multilingual website is any website that offers content in more than one language. Examples of multilingual websites might include a Canadian business with an English and a French version of its site, or a blog on Latin American soccer available in both Spanish and Portuguese.
Usually, it makes sense to have a multilingual website when your target audience consists of speakers of different languages. If your blog on Latin American soccer aims to reach the Brazilian audience, you may choose to publish it only in Portuguese. But if you’d like to reach soccer fans from Argentina also, then providing content in Spanish could help you with that.
Google tries to determine the main languages of each one of your pages. You can help to make language recognition easier if you stick to only one language per page and avoid side-by-side translations. Although Google can recognize a page as being in more than one language, we recommend using the same language for all elements of a page: headers, sidebars, menus, etc.
Keep in mind that Google ignores all code-level language information, from “lang” attributes to Document Type Definitions (DTD). Some web editing programs create these attributes automatically, and therefore they aren’t very reliable when trying to determine the language of a webpage.
Someone who comes to Google and does a search in their language expects to find localized search results, and this is where you, as a webmaster, come in: if you’re going to localize, make it visible in the search results with some of our tips below.
There's no need to create special URLs when developing a multilingual website. Nonetheless, your users might like to identify what section of your website they’re on just by glancing at the URL. For example, the following URLs let users know that they’re on the English section of this site:
http://example.ca/en/mountain-bikes.html
http://en.example.ca/mountain-bikes.html
While these other URLs let users know that they’re viewing the same page in French:
http://example.ca/fr/mountain-bikes.html
http://fr.example.ca/mountain-bikes.html
Additionally, this URL structure will make it easier for you to analyze the indexing of your multilingual content.
If you want to create URLs with non-English characters, make sure to use UTF-8 encoding. UTF-8 encoded URLs should be properly escaped when linked from within your content. Should you need to escape your URLs manually, you can easily find an online URL encoder that will do this for you. For example, if I wanted to translate the following URL from English to French,
http://example.ca/fr/mountain-bikes.html
It might look something like this:
http://example.ca/fr/vélo-de-montagne.html
Since this URL contains one non-English character (é), this is what it would look like properly escaped for use in a link on your pages:
http://example.ca/fr/v%C3%A9lo-de-montagne
We recommend that you do not allow automated translations to get indexed. Automated translations don’t always make sense and they could potentially be viewed as spam. More importantly, the point of making a multilingual website is to reach a larger audience by providing valuable content in several languages. If your users can’t understand an automated translation or if it feels artificial to them, you should ask yourself whether you really want to present this kind of content to them.
If you’re going to localize, make it easy for Googlebot to crawl all language versions of your site. Consider cross-linking page by page. In other words, you can provide links between pages with the same content in different languages. This can also be very helpful to your users. Following our previous example, let’s suppose that a French speaker happens to land on http://example.ca/en/mountain-bikes.html; now, with one click he can get to http://example.ca/fr/vélo-de-montagne.html where he can view the same content in French.
To make all of your site's content more crawlable, avoid automatic redirections based on the user's perceived language. These redirections could prevent users (and search engines) from viewing all the versions of your site.
And last but not least, keep the content for each language on separate URLs - don't use cookies to show translated versions.
Google directly extracts character encodings from HTTP headers, HTML page headers, and content. There isn’t much you need to do about character encoding, other than watching out for conflicting information - for example, between content and headers. While Google can recognize different character encodings, we recommend that you use UTF-8 on your website whenever possible.
Now that you know all of this, your tongue may get twisted when you speak many languages, but your website doesn’t have to!
For more information, read our post on multi-regional sites and stay tuned for our next post, where we'll delve into special situations that may arise when working with global websites. Until then, don't hesitate to drop by the Help Forum and join the discussion!
this is a topic published in 2013... to get contents for your blog or your forum, just contact me at: devnasser@gmail.com
A multilingual website is any website that offers content in more than one language. Examples of multilingual websites might include a Canadian business with an English and a French version of its site, or a blog on Latin American soccer available in both Spanish and Portuguese.
Usually, it makes sense to have a multilingual website when your target audience consists of speakers of different languages. If your blog on Latin American soccer aims to reach the Brazilian audience, you may choose to publish it only in Portuguese. But if you’d like to reach soccer fans from Argentina also, then providing content in Spanish could help you with that.
Google and language recognition
Google tries to determine the main languages of each one of your pages. You can help to make language recognition easier if you stick to only one language per page and avoid side-by-side translations. Although Google can recognize a page as being in more than one language, we recommend using the same language for all elements of a page: headers, sidebars, menus, etc.
Keep in mind that Google ignores all code-level language information, from “lang” attributes to Document Type Definitions (DTD). Some web editing programs create these attributes automatically, and therefore they aren’t very reliable when trying to determine the language of a webpage.
Someone who comes to Google and does a search in their language expects to find localized search results, and this is where you, as a webmaster, come in: if you’re going to localize, make it visible in the search results with some of our tips below.
The anatomy of a multilingual site: URL structure
There's no need to create special URLs when developing a multilingual website. Nonetheless, your users might like to identify what section of your website they’re on just by glancing at the URL. For example, the following URLs let users know that they’re on the English section of this site:
http://example.ca/en/mountain-bikes.html
http://en.example.ca/mountain-bikes.html
While these other URLs let users know that they’re viewing the same page in French:
http://example.ca/fr/mountain-bikes.html
http://fr.example.ca/mountain-bikes.html
Additionally, this URL structure will make it easier for you to analyze the indexing of your multilingual content.
If you want to create URLs with non-English characters, make sure to use UTF-8 encoding. UTF-8 encoded URLs should be properly escaped when linked from within your content. Should you need to escape your URLs manually, you can easily find an online URL encoder that will do this for you. For example, if I wanted to translate the following URL from English to French,
http://example.ca/fr/mountain-bikes.html
It might look something like this:
http://example.ca/fr/vélo-de-montagne.html
Since this URL contains one non-English character (é), this is what it would look like properly escaped for use in a link on your pages:
http://example.ca/fr/v%C3%A9lo-de-montagne
Crawling and indexing your multilingual website
We recommend that you do not allow automated translations to get indexed. Automated translations don’t always make sense and they could potentially be viewed as spam. More importantly, the point of making a multilingual website is to reach a larger audience by providing valuable content in several languages. If your users can’t understand an automated translation or if it feels artificial to them, you should ask yourself whether you really want to present this kind of content to them.
If you’re going to localize, make it easy for Googlebot to crawl all language versions of your site. Consider cross-linking page by page. In other words, you can provide links between pages with the same content in different languages. This can also be very helpful to your users. Following our previous example, let’s suppose that a French speaker happens to land on http://example.ca/en/mountain-bikes.html; now, with one click he can get to http://example.ca/fr/vélo-de-montagne.html where he can view the same content in French.
To make all of your site's content more crawlable, avoid automatic redirections based on the user's perceived language. These redirections could prevent users (and search engines) from viewing all the versions of your site.
And last but not least, keep the content for each language on separate URLs - don't use cookies to show translated versions.
Working with character encodings
Google directly extracts character encodings from HTTP headers, HTML page headers, and content. There isn’t much you need to do about character encoding, other than watching out for conflicting information - for example, between content and headers. While Google can recognize different character encodings, we recommend that you use UTF-8 on your website whenever possible.
If your tongue gets twisted...
Now that you know all of this, your tongue may get twisted when you speak many languages, but your website doesn’t have to!
For more information, read our post on multi-regional sites and stay tuned for our next post, where we'll delve into special situations that may arise when working with global websites. Until then, don't hesitate to drop by the Help Forum and join the discussion!
this is a topic published in 2013... to get contents for your blog or your forum, just contact me at: devnasser@gmail.com
from web contents: Helping you break the language barrier 2013
salam every one, this is a topic from google web master centrale blog:
When webmasters put content out on the web it's there for the world to see. Unfortunately, most content on the web is only published in a single language, understandable by only a fraction of the world's population.
In a continued effort to make the world's information universally accessible, Google Translate has a number of tools for you to automatically translate your content into the languages of the world.
Users may already be translating your webpage using Google Translate, but you can make it even easier by including our "Translate My Page" gadget, available at http://translate.google.com/translate_tools.
The gadget will be rendered in the user's language, so if they come to your page and can't understand anything else, they'll be able to read the gadget, and translate your page into their language.
Sometimes there may be some content on your page that you don't want us to translate. You can now add class=notranslate to any HTML element to prevent that element from being translated. For example, you may want to do something like:
Update on 12/15/2008: We also support:
Lastly, if you want to do some fancier automatic translation integrated directly into your page, check out the AJAX Language API we launched last March.
With these tools we hope you can more easily make your content available in all the languages we support, including Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Filipino, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese.
this is a topic published in 2013... to get contents for your blog or your forum, just contact me at: devnasser@gmail.comIn a continued effort to make the world's information universally accessible, Google Translate has a number of tools for you to automatically translate your content into the languages of the world.
Users may already be translating your webpage using Google Translate, but you can make it even easier by including our "Translate My Page" gadget, available at http://translate.google.com/translate_tools.
The gadget will be rendered in the user's language, so if they come to your page and can't understand anything else, they'll be able to read the gadget, and translate your page into their language.
Sometimes there may be some content on your page that you don't want us to translate. You can now add class=notranslate to any HTML element to prevent that element from being translated. For example, you may want to do something like:
Email us at <span class="notranslate">sales at mydomain dot com</span>And if you have an entire page that should not be translated, you can add:
<meta name="google" value="notranslate">to the <head> of your page and we won't translate any of the content on that page.
Update on 12/15/2008: We also support:
<meta name="google" content="notranslate">Thanks to chaoskaizer for pointing this out in the comments. :)
Lastly, if you want to do some fancier automatic translation integrated directly into your page, check out the AJAX Language API we launched last March.
With these tools we hope you can more easily make your content available in all the languages we support, including Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Filipino, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese.
from web contents: Better targeting your indic language site 2013
salam every one, this is a topic from google web master centrale blog:
A lot has been said about how to start a multi-lingual site and how to better target content through meta tags. Our users have raised a number of interesting questions about creating websites in different languages, like the one below.
‘ganex':
> How does one do for INDIA.
> As there are many languages spoken here.
> My Site is primarily in English, but my site targets different cities in INDIA.
> For Hyderabad - I want in Urdu & Telugu and for Chennai I want in Tamil
> for Bengaluru I want in Kannada.
> For North I want in Hindi.’
We’d like to introduce the transliteration API for Indic languages (languages spoken in India) in addition to our Ajax API for languages. With this API at your disposal, content creation is simplified because it not only helps integrating transliteration in your websites but also allows users visiting your site to type in Indic languages.
To include the transliteration API, first you need the AJAX script.
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.google.com/jsapi"></>
This script tag will load the
<script type="text/javascript">
google.load("elements", "1", {
packages: "transliteration"
});
</script>
When it comes to targeting, don't forget to add meta tags in your local language. And for your questions, we have a new addition to our already existing communication channels like the webmaster help groups and webmaster tools (available in 26 languages!). We also have our own official Orkut webmaster community! Here users can share thoughts and discuss webmaster related issues.
Sign up for our Orkut community now and if you have any additional thoughts we'd love to hear about them.
Cheers,
this is a topic published in 2013... to get contents for your blog or your forum, just contact me at: devnasser@gmail.com‘ganex':
> How does one do for INDIA.
> As there are many languages spoken here.
> My Site is primarily in English, but my site targets different cities in INDIA.
> For Hyderabad - I want in Urdu & Telugu and for Chennai I want in Tamil
> for Bengaluru I want in Kannada.
> For North I want in Hindi.’
We’d like to introduce the transliteration API for Indic languages (languages spoken in India) in addition to our Ajax API for languages. With this API at your disposal, content creation is simplified because it not only helps integrating transliteration in your websites but also allows users visiting your site to type in Indic languages.
To include the transliteration API, first you need the AJAX script.
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.google.com/jsapi"></>
This script tag will load the
google.load function, which lets you load the individual Google APIs. For loading Google Transliteration API, call to google.load looks like this:<script type="text/javascript">
google.load("elements", "1", {
packages: "transliteration"
});
</script>
When it comes to targeting, don't forget to add meta tags in your local language. And for your questions, we have a new addition to our already existing communication channels like the webmaster help groups and webmaster tools (available in 26 languages!). We also have our own official Orkut webmaster community! Here users can share thoughts and discuss webmaster related issues.
Sign up for our Orkut community now and if you have any additional thoughts we'd love to hear about them.
Cheers,
from web contents: Working with multi-regional websites 2013
salam every one, this is a topic from google web master centrale blog: Webmaster Level: Intermediate
Did you know that a majority of users surveyed feel that having information in their own language was more important than a low price? Living in a non-English-speaking country, I've seen friends and family members explicitly look for and use local and localized websites—properly localized sites definitely have an advantage with users. Google works hard to show users the best possible search results. Many times those are going to be pages that are localized, for the user's location and/or in the user's language.
If you're planning to take the time to create and maintain a localized version of your website, making it easy to recognize and find is a logical part of that process. In this blog post series, we'll take a look at what is involved with multi-regional and multi-lingual websites from a search engine point of view. A multi-regional website is one that explicitly targets users in various regions (generally different countries); we call it multilingual when it is available in multiple languages, and sometimes, the website targets both multiple regions and is in multiple languages. Let's start with some general preparations and then look at websites that target multiple regions.
All websites start with domain names; when it comes to domain names, Google differentiates between two types of domain names:
Note that we do not use locational meta tags (like "geo.position" or "distribution") or HTML attributes for geotargeting. While these may be useful in other regards, we've found that they are generally not reliable enough to use for geotargeting.
As you can see, geotargeting is not an exact science (even sites using country-code top level domain names can be global in nature), so it's important that you plan for the users from the "wrong" location. One way to do this could be to show links on all pages for users to select their region and language of choice. We'll look at some other possible solutions further on in this blog post series.
Do you already have a website that targets multiple regions or do you have questions about the process of planning one? Come to the Help Forum and join the discussion. In following posts, we'll take a look at multi-lingual websites and then look at some special situations that can arise with global websites. Bis bald!
this is a topic published in 2013... to get contents for your blog or your forum, just contact me at: devnasser@gmail.com
Did you know that a majority of users surveyed feel that having information in their own language was more important than a low price? Living in a non-English-speaking country, I've seen friends and family members explicitly look for and use local and localized websites—properly localized sites definitely have an advantage with users. Google works hard to show users the best possible search results. Many times those are going to be pages that are localized, for the user's location and/or in the user's language.
If you're planning to take the time to create and maintain a localized version of your website, making it easy to recognize and find is a logical part of that process. In this blog post series, we'll take a look at what is involved with multi-regional and multi-lingual websites from a search engine point of view. A multi-regional website is one that explicitly targets users in various regions (generally different countries); we call it multilingual when it is available in multiple languages, and sometimes, the website targets both multiple regions and is in multiple languages. Let's start with some general preparations and then look at websites that target multiple regions.
Preparing for global websites
Expanding a website to cover multiple regions and/or languages can be challenging. By creating multiple versions of your website, any issues with the base version will be multiplied; make sure that you have everything working properly before you start. Given that this generally means you'll suddenly be working with a multiplied number of URLs, don't forget that you'll need appropriate infrastructure to support the website.Planning multi-regional websites
When planning sites for multiple regions (usually countries), don't forget to research legal or administrative requirements that might come into play first. These requirements may determine how you proceed, for instance whether or not you would be eligible to use a country-specific domain name.All websites start with domain names; when it comes to domain names, Google differentiates between two types of domain names:
- ccTLDs (country-code top level domain names): These are tied to a specific country (for example .de for Germany, .cn for China). Users and search engines use this as a strong sign that your website is explicitly for a certain country.
- gTLDs (generic top level domain names): These are not tied to a specific country. Examples of gTLds are .com, .net, .org, .museum. Google sees regional top level domain names such as .eu and .asia as gTLDs, since they cannot be tied to a specific country. We also treat some vanity ccTLDs (such as .tv, .me, etc.) as gTLDs as we've found that users and webmasters frequently see these as being more generic than country-targeted (we don't have a complete list of such vanity ccTLDs that we treat as gTLDs as it may change over time). You can set geotargeting for websites with gTLDs using the Webmaster Tools Geographic Target setting.
Geotargeting factors
Google generally uses the following elements to determine the geotargeting of a website (or a part of a website):- Use of a ccTLD is generally a strong signal for users since it explicitly specifies a single country in an unmistakable way.
or
Webmaster Tools' manual geotargeting for gTLDs (this can be on a domain, subdomain or subdirectory level); more information on this can be found in our blog post and in the Help Center. With region tags from geotargeting being shown in search results, this method is also very clear to users. Please keep in mind that it generally does not make sense to set a geographic target if the same pages on your site target more than a single country (say, all German-speaking countries) — just write in that language and do not use the geotargeting setting (more on writing in other languages will follow soon!). - Server location (through the IP address of the server) is frequently near your users. However, some websites use distributed content delivery networks (CDNs) or are hosted in a country with better webserver infrastructure, so we try not to rely on the server location alone.
- Other signals can give us hints. This could be from local addresses & phone numbers on the pages, use of local language and currency, links from other local sites, and/or the use of Google's Local Business Center (where available).
Note that we do not use locational meta tags (like "geo.position" or "distribution") or HTML attributes for geotargeting. While these may be useful in other regards, we've found that they are generally not reliable enough to use for geotargeting.
URL structures
The first three elements used for geotargeting are strongly tied to the server and to the URLs used. It's difficult to determine geotargeting on a page by page basis, so it makes sense to consider using a URL structure that makes it easy to segment parts of the website for geotargeting. Here are some of the possible URL structures with pros and cons with regards to geotargeting:| ccTLDs eg: example.de, example.fr | Subdomains with gTLDs eg: de.site.com, fr.site.com, etc. | Subdirectories with gTLDs eg: site.com/de/, site.com/fr/, etc. | URL parameters eg: site.com?loc=de, ?country=france, etc. |
| pros (+) - clear geotargeting - server location is irrelevant - easy separation of sites - legal requirements (sometimes) | pros (+) - easy to set up - can use Webmaster Tools geotargeting - allows different server locations - easy separation of sites | pros (+) - easy to set up - can use Webmaster Tools geotargeting - low maintenance (same host) | pros (+) (not recommended) |
| cons (-) - expensive (+ availability) - more infrastructure - ccTLD requirements (sometimes) | cons (-) - users might not recognize geotargeting from the URL alone (is "de" the language or country?) | cons (-) - users might not recognize geotargeting from the URL alone - single server location - separation of sites harder | cons (-) - segmentation based on the URL is difficult - users might not recognize geotargeting from the URL alone - geotargeting in Webmaster Tools is not possible |
As you can see, geotargeting is not an exact science (even sites using country-code top level domain names can be global in nature), so it's important that you plan for the users from the "wrong" location. One way to do this could be to show links on all pages for users to select their region and language of choice. We'll look at some other possible solutions further on in this blog post series.
Dealing with duplicate content on global websites
Websites that provide content for different regions and in different languages sometimes create content that is the same or similar but available on different URLs. This is generally not a problem as long as the content is for different users in different countries. While we strongly recommend that you provide unique content for each different group of users, we understand that this may not always be possible for all pages and variations from the start. There is generally no need to "hide" the duplicates by disallowing crawling in a robots.txt file or by using a "noindex" robots meta tag. However, if you're providing the same content to the same users on different URLs (for instance, if both "example.de/" and "example.com/de/" show German language content for users in Germany), it would make sense to choose a preferred version and to redirect (or use the "rel=canonical" link element) appropriately.Do you already have a website that targets multiple regions or do you have questions about the process of planning one? Come to the Help Forum and join the discussion. In following posts, we'll take a look at multi-lingual websites and then look at some special situations that can arise with global websites. Bis bald!
this is a topic published in 2013... to get contents for your blog or your forum, just contact me at: devnasser@gmail.com
from web contents: Îñţérñåţîöñåļîžåţîöñ 2013
salam every one, this is a topic from google web master centrale blog:
Webmaster level: Intermediate
So you’re going global, and you need your website to follow. Should be a simple case of getting the text translated and you’re good to go, right? Probably not. The Google Webmaster Team frequently builds sites that are localized into over 40 languages, so here are some things that we take into account when launching our pages in both other languages and regions.
(Even if you think you might be immune to these issues because you only offer content in English, it could be that non-English language visitors are using tools like Google Translate to view your content in their language. This traffic should show up in your analytics dashboard, so you can get an idea of how many visitors are not viewing your site in the way it’s intended.)
Keeping the HTML code the same for all languages has its advantages when it comes to maintenance. Hacking around with the HTML code for each language to fix bugs doesn’t scale–keep your page code as clean as possible and deal with any styling issues in the CSS. To name just one benefit of clean code: most translation tools will parse out the translatable content strings from the HTML document and that job is made much easier when the HTML is well-structured and valid.
Variable word lengths cause particular issues in form labels and controls. If your form layout displays labels on the left and fields on the right, for example, longer text strings can flow over into two lines, whereas shorter text strings do not seem associated with their form input fields–both scenarios ruin the design and impede the readability of the form. Also consider the extra styling you’ll need for right-to-left (RTL) layouts (more on that later). For these reasons we design forms with labels above fields, for easy readability and styling that will translate well across languages.
click to enlarge
Our own day-to-day usage has shown the following editors to currently provide decent solutions for bidirectional editing: particularly Coda, and also Dreamweaver, IntelliJ IDEA and JEditX.
When designing for RTL languages you can build most of the support you need into the core CSS and use the directional attribute of the html element (for backwards compatibility) in combination with a class on the body element. As always, keeping all styles in one core stylesheet makes for better maintainability.
Some key styling issues to watch out for: any elements floated right will need to be floated left and vice versa; extra padding or margin widths applied to one side of an element will need to be overridden and switched, and any text-align attributes should be reversed.
We generally use the following approach, including using a class on the body tag rather than a html[dir=rtl] CSS selector because this is compatible with older browsers:
(See this in action in English and Arabic.)
One final note on this subject: most of the time your content destined for right-to-left language pages will be bidirectional rather than purely RTL, because some strings will probably need to retain their LTR direction–for example, company names in Latin script or telephone numbers. The way to make sure the browser handles this correctly in a primarily RTL document is to wrap the embedded text strings with an inline element using an attribute to set direction, like this:
In cases where you don’t have an HTML container to hook the dir attribute into, such as title elements or JavaScript-generated source code for message prompts, you can use this equivalent to set direction where ‫ and ‬ are Unicode control characters for right-to-left embedding:
Example usage in JavaScript code:
(For more detail, see the W3C’s articles on creating HTML for Arabic, Hebrew and other right-to-left scripts and authoring right-to-left scripts.)
Check that your editor and browser encodings are set to UTF-8 (recommended) and consider adding a element and the lang attribute of the html element to your HTML template so browsers know what to expect when rendering your page–this has the added benefit of ensuring that all Unicode characters are displayed correctly, so using HTML entities such as é (é) will not be necessary, saving valuable bytes! Check the W3C’s tutorial on character encoding if you’re having trouble–it contains in-depth explanations of the issues.
Using a conventional standard will help users understand your site’s structure as well as making it more maintainable for all webmasters who might develop the site, and using the language codes for other site assets (logo images, PDF documents) is handy to be able to quickly identify files.
See previous Webmaster Central posts for advice about URL structures and other issues surrounding working with multi-regional websites and working with multilingual websites.
That’s a summary of the main challenges we wrestle with on a daily basis; but we can vouch for the fact that putting in the planning and work up front towards well-structured HTML and robust CSS pays dividends during localization!
this is a topic published in 2013... to get contents for your blog or your forum, just contact me at: devnasser@gmail.comSo you’re going global, and you need your website to follow. Should be a simple case of getting the text translated and you’re good to go, right? Probably not. The Google Webmaster Team frequently builds sites that are localized into over 40 languages, so here are some things that we take into account when launching our pages in both other languages and regions.
(Even if you think you might be immune to these issues because you only offer content in English, it could be that non-English language visitors are using tools like Google Translate to view your content in their language. This traffic should show up in your analytics dashboard, so you can get an idea of how many visitors are not viewing your site in the way it’s intended.)
More languages != more HTML templates
We can’t recommend this enough: reuse the same template for all language versions, and always try to keep the HTML of your template simple.Keeping the HTML code the same for all languages has its advantages when it comes to maintenance. Hacking around with the HTML code for each language to fix bugs doesn’t scale–keep your page code as clean as possible and deal with any styling issues in the CSS. To name just one benefit of clean code: most translation tools will parse out the translatable content strings from the HTML document and that job is made much easier when the HTML is well-structured and valid.
How long is a piece of string?
If your design relies on text playing nicely with fixed-size elements, then translating your text might wreak havoc. For example, your left-hand side navigation text is likely to translate into much longer strings of text in several languages–check out the difference in string lengths between some English and Dutch language navigation for the same content. Be prepared for navigation titles that might wrap onto more than one line by figuring out your line height to accommodate this (also worth considering when you create your navigation text in English in the first place).Variable word lengths cause particular issues in form labels and controls. If your form layout displays labels on the left and fields on the right, for example, longer text strings can flow over into two lines, whereas shorter text strings do not seem associated with their form input fields–both scenarios ruin the design and impede the readability of the form. Also consider the extra styling you’ll need for right-to-left (RTL) layouts (more on that later). For these reasons we design forms with labels above fields, for easy readability and styling that will translate well across languages.
click to enlarge
Also avoid fixed-height columns–if you’re attempting to neaten up your layout with box backgrounds that match in height, chances are when your text is translated, the text will overrun areas that were only tall enough to contain your English content. Think about whether the UI elements you’re planning to use in your design will work when there is more or less text–for instance, horizontal vs. vertical tabs.
On the flip side
Source editing for bidirectional HTML can be problematic because many editors have not been built to support the Unicode bidirectional algorithm (more research on the problems and solutions). In short, the way your markup is displayed might get garbled:<p>ابةتث <img src="foo.jpg" alt=" جحخد"< ذرزسش!</p>
Our own day-to-day usage has shown the following editors to currently provide decent solutions for bidirectional editing: particularly Coda, and also Dreamweaver, IntelliJ IDEA and JEditX.
When designing for RTL languages you can build most of the support you need into the core CSS and use the directional attribute of the html element (for backwards compatibility) in combination with a class on the body element. As always, keeping all styles in one core stylesheet makes for better maintainability.
Some key styling issues to watch out for: any elements floated right will need to be floated left and vice versa; extra padding or margin widths applied to one side of an element will need to be overridden and switched, and any text-align attributes should be reversed.
We generally use the following approach, including using a class on the body tag rather than a html[dir=rtl] CSS selector because this is compatible with older browsers:
Elements:
<body class="rtl">
<h1><a href="http://www.blogger.com/"><img alt="Google" src="http://www.google.com/images/logos/google_logo.png" /></a> Heading</h1>
Left-to-right (default) styling:
h1 {
height: 55px;
line-height: 2.05;
margin: 0 0 25px;
overflow: hidden;
}
h1 img {
float: left;
margin: 0 43px 0 0;
position: relative;
}Right-to-left styling:
body.rtl {
direction: rtl;
}
body.rtl h1 img {
float: right;
margin: 0 0 0 43px;
}(See this in action in English and Arabic.)
One final note on this subject: most of the time your content destined for right-to-left language pages will be bidirectional rather than purely RTL, because some strings will probably need to retain their LTR direction–for example, company names in Latin script or telephone numbers. The way to make sure the browser handles this correctly in a primarily RTL document is to wrap the embedded text strings with an inline element using an attribute to set direction, like this:
<h2>עוד ב- <span dir="ltr">Google</span></h2>
In cases where you don’t have an HTML container to hook the dir attribute into, such as title elements or JavaScript-generated source code for message prompts, you can use this equivalent to set direction where ‫ and ‬ are Unicode control characters for right-to-left embedding:
<title>‫הפוך את Google לדף הבית שלך‬</title>
Example usage in JavaScript code:
var ffError = '\u202B' +'כדי להגדיר את Google כדף הבית שלך ב\x2DFirefox, לחץ על הקישור \x22הפוך את Google לדף הבית שלי\x22, וגרור אותו אל סמל ה\x22בית\x22 בדפדפן שלך.'+ '\u202C';
(For more detail, see the W3C’s articles on creating HTML for Arabic, Hebrew and other right-to-left scripts and authoring right-to-left scripts.)
It’s all Greek to me…
If you’ve never worked with non-Latin character sets before (Cyrillic, Greek, and a myriad of Asian and Indic), you might find that both your editor and browser do not display content as intended.Check that your editor and browser encodings are set to UTF-8 (recommended) and consider adding a element and the lang attribute of the html element to your HTML template so browsers know what to expect when rendering your page–this has the added benefit of ensuring that all Unicode characters are displayed correctly, so using HTML entities such as é (é) will not be necessary, saving valuable bytes! Check the W3C’s tutorial on character encoding if you’re having trouble–it contains in-depth explanations of the issues.
A word on naming
Lastly, a practical tip on naming conventions when creating several language versions. Using a standard such as the ISO 639-1 language codes for naming helps when you start to deal with several language versions of the same document.Using a conventional standard will help users understand your site’s structure as well as making it more maintainable for all webmasters who might develop the site, and using the language codes for other site assets (logo images, PDF documents) is handy to be able to quickly identify files.
See previous Webmaster Central posts for advice about URL structures and other issues surrounding working with multi-regional websites and working with multilingual websites.
That’s a summary of the main challenges we wrestle with on a daily basis; but we can vouch for the fact that putting in the planning and work up front towards well-structured HTML and robust CSS pays dividends during localization!
from web contents: Introducing "x-default hreflang" for international landing pages 2013
salam every one, this is a topic from google web master centrale blog: 
Webmaster Level: All
The homepages of multinational and multilingual websites are sometimes configured to point visitors to localized pages, either via redirects or by changing the content to reflect the user’s language. Today we’ll introduce a new rel-alternate-hreflang annotation that the webmaster can use to specify such homepages that is supported by both Google and Yandex.
To see this in action, let’s look at an example. The website example.com has content that targets users around the world as follows:
- http://example.com/en-gb: For English-speaking users in the UK
- http://example.com/en-us: For English-speaking users in the USA
- http://example.com/en-au: For English-speaking users in Australia
- http://example.com/: The homepage shows users a country selector and is the default page for users worldwide
In this case, the webmaster can annotate this cluster of pages using rel-alternate-hreflang using Sitemaps or using HTML link tags like this:
<link rel="alternate" href="http://example.com/en-gb" hreflang="en-gb" />
<link rel="alternate" href="http://example.com/en-us" hreflang="en-us" />
<link rel="alternate" href="http://example.com/en-au" hreflang="en-au" />
<link rel="alternate" href="http://example.com/" hreflang="x-default" />
The new x-default hreflang attribute value signals to our algorithms that this page doesn’t target any specific language or locale and is the default page when no other page is better suited. For example, it would be the page our algorithms try to show French-speaking searchers worldwide or English-speaking searchers on google.ca.
The same annotation applies for homepages that dynamically alter their contents based on a user’s perceived geolocation or the Accept-Language headers. The x-default hreflang value signals to our algorithms that such a page doesn’t target a specific language or locale.
As always, if you have any questions or feedback, please tell us in the Internationalization Webmaster Help Forum.
this is a topic published in 2013... to get contents for your blog or your forum, just contact me at: devnasser@gmail.com
from web contents: Unifying content under multilingual templates 2013
salam every one, this is a topic from google web master centrale blog: Webmaster Level: Advanced
If you have a global site containing pages where the:
As you know, when rel=”canonical” or a 301 response code is properly implemented, we become more precise in clustering information from duplicate URLs, such as consolidating their linking properties. Now, when
Sample configuration that’s prime for
How does this all work? Imagine that you’re the proud owner of example.com, a site called “The Network” where you allow users to create their very own profile. Let’s say Javier Lopez, a Spanish speaker, makes his page at http://es.example.com/javier-lopez:
Because you’re trying to target a multilingual audience, once Javier hits “Publish,” his profile becomes immediately available in other languages with the translated templates. Also, each of the new language versions is served on a separate URL.
Two localized versions, http://en.example.com/javier-lopez in English and http://fr.example.com/javier-lopez in French
Background on the old issue: duplicate content caused by language variations
The configuration above allowed visitors speaking different languages to more easily interpret the content, but for search engines it was slightly problematic: there are three URLs (English, French, and Spanish versions) for the same main content in Javier’s profile. Webmasters wanted to avoid duplicate content issues (such as PageRank dilution) from these multiple versions and still ensure that we would serve the appropriate version to the user.
A new solution for localized templates
First of all, just to be clear, the strategy we’re proposing isn’t appropriate for multilingual sites that completely translate each page’s content. We’re trying to specifically improve the situation where the template is localized but the main content of a page remains duplicate/identical across language/country variants.
Before we get into the specific steps, our prior advice remains applicable:
Results of the above implementation
To recap (one more time, with feeling!)
For sites that have their template localized but the keep their pages’ main content untranslated:
Step 1: Once you have the canonical picked out you can use either rel=”canonical” or a 301 (permanent redirect) from the various localized pages to the canonical URL.
Step 2: On the canonical URL, specify the language-specific duplicated content with different boilerplate via the rel=”alternate” link tag, using its
We realize this can be a little complicated, so if you have questions, please ask in our webmaster forum!
this is a topic published in 2013... to get contents for your blog or your forum, just contact me at: devnasser@gmail.com
Update: This markup can now be used for multilingual and multi-regional content in general. More information.
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,
<link rel=”alternate” hreflang="a-different-language" href="http://url-of-the-different-language-page" />As you know, when rel=”canonical” or a 301 response code is properly implemented, we become more precise in clustering information from duplicate URLs, such as consolidating their linking properties. Now, when
rel=”alternate” hreflang=”x” is included in conjunction with rel=”canonical” or 301s, not only will our indexing and linking properties be more accurate, but we can better serve users the URL of their preferred language.Sample configuration that’s prime for
rel=”alternate” hreflang=”x”How does this all work? Imagine that you’re the proud owner of example.com, a site called “The Network” where you allow users to create their very own profile. Let’s say Javier Lopez, a Spanish speaker, makes his page at http://es.example.com/javier-lopez:
Because you’re trying to target a multilingual audience, once Javier hits “Publish,” his profile becomes immediately available in other languages with the translated templates. Also, each of the new language versions is served on a separate URL.
Two localized versions, http://en.example.com/javier-lopez in English and http://fr.example.com/javier-lopez in French
Background on the old issue: duplicate content caused by language variations
The configuration above allowed visitors speaking different languages to more easily interpret the content, but for search engines it was slightly problematic: there are three URLs (English, French, and Spanish versions) for the same main content in Javier’s profile. Webmasters wanted to avoid duplicate content issues (such as PageRank dilution) from these multiple versions and still ensure that we would serve the appropriate version to the user.
A new solution for localized templates
First of all, just to be clear, the strategy we’re proposing isn’t appropriate for multilingual sites that completely translate each page’s content. We’re trying to specifically improve the situation where the template is localized but the main content of a page remains duplicate/identical across language/country variants.
Before we get into the specific steps, our prior advice remains applicable:
- Have one URL associated with one piece of content. We recommend against using the same URL for multiple languages, such as serving both French and English versions on example.com/page.html based on user information (IP address, Accept-Language HTTP header).
- When multiple languages are at play, it’s best to include the language or country indication in the URL, e.g., example.com/en/welcome.html and example.com/fr/accueil.html (which specify “en” and “fr”) rather than example.com/welcome.html and example.com/accueil.html (which don’t contain an explicit country/language specification). More suggestions can be found in our blog posts about designing localized URLs and multilingual sites.
Step 1: Select the proper canonical.Once the steps are completed, the configuration on “The Network” would look like this:
The canonical designates the version of your content you’d like indexed and returned to users.The first step towards making the right content indexable is to pick one canonical URL that best reflects the genuine locale of the page’s main content. In the example above, since Javier is a Spanish-speaking user and he created his profile on es.example.com, http://es.example.com/javier-lopez is the logical canonical. The title and snippet in all locales will be selected from the canonical URL.Step 2: In the canonical URL, specify the various language versions via the rel=”alternate” link tag, using its
Once you have the canonical URL picked out, you can either:A. 301 (permanent redirect) from the language variants to the canonical
As an example, if a French speaker visits fr.example.com/javier-lopez (not the canonical), have this page include a cookie to remember the user's language preference of French. Then permanently redirect from fr.example.com/javier-lopez to the canonical at es.example.com/javier-lopez. Because of the cookie, es.example.com/javier-lopez will still render its boilerplate in French (even on the es.example.com subdomain!). Similarly, en.example.com/javier-lopez would set the value of this cookie to English and then 301 redirect to es.example.com/javier-lopez.
Including a language selection link is also helpful should a multilingual user prefer a different experience of your site.
B. Use rel=”canonical”
On the other language variants, include alink rel=”canonical”tag pointing to your chosen canonical. In our example, since the canonical for Javier’s profile is the Spanish version, the English and French pages (and optionally even the Spanish page itself) would include<link rel=”canonical” href="http://es.example.com/javier-lopez" />.
Cookies are not involved in this setup. Therefore, a French speaker will be served es.example.com/javier-lopez with a Spanish template. Implement step 2 if you want the French speakers to be served the French version at fr.example.com/javier-lopez in Google search results.hreflangattribute.
rel=”alternate” URLs can be displayed in search results in accordance with a user’s language preference. The title and snippet, however, remain generated from the canonical URL (as is customary with rel=”canonical”), not from the content of any rel=”alternate”.You can help Google display the correctly localized variant of your URL to our international users by adding the following tags to http://es.example.com/javier-lopez, the selected canonical:<link rel=”alternate” hreflang="en" href="http://en.example.com/javier-lopez" /><link rel=”alternate” hreflang="fr" href="http://fr.example.com/javier-lopez" />rel=”alternate”indicates that the URL contains an alternate version located at the URI of thehrefvalue.hreflangidentifies the language code of the alternate URL and can be specified with ISO-639.
Please note: If your site supports many languages and you’re worried about the increased file size when declaring numerous rel=”alternate” URLs, please see our Help Center article about configuring rel=”alternate” with file size constraints.
- http://en.example.com/javier-lopez
either 301s with a language cookie or contains
<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://es.example.com/javier-lopez” /> - http://fr.example.com/javier-lopez
either 301s with a language cookie or contains
<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://es.example.com/javier-lopez” /> - http://es.example.com/javier-lopez
is the canonical and contains
<link rel=”alternate” hreflang="en" href="http://en.example.com/javier-lopez" />
and<link rel=”alternate” hreflang="fr" href="http://fr.example.com/javier-lopez" />
Results of the above implementation
- When your content is returned in search results, users will likely see the URL that corresponds to their language preference, whether or not it’s the canonical. (Good news!) This is because with with
rel=”canonical”or a 301 redirect, we can cluster the language variations with the canonical. Withrel=”alternate” hreflang=”x”at serve-time we can deliver the URL of the most appropriate language to the user: English speakers will be serveden.example.com/javier-lopezas the result for the URL in Javier’s profile, French speakers will seefr.example.com/javier-lopez, Spanish speakers will seees.example.com/javier-lopez. - By implementing step 1, only content from the canonical version will be available for users in search results (i.e. content from the duplicate versions won’t be searchable). Because the Spanish version
es.example.com/javier-lopezis the canonical, queries that include template content from this page, e.g. [Javier Lopez familia] -- when using any language preference -- may return his profile (content from the canonical version). On the other hand, queries that include template content of the “duplicate” version, e.g. [Javier Lopez family], are less likely to return his profile page. If you would like the other language versions indexed separately and searchable, avoid using rel=”canonical” and rel=”alternate”. - Indexing properties, such as linking information, from the duplicate language variants will be consolidated with the canonical.
To recap (one more time, with feeling!)
For sites that have their template localized but the keep their pages’ main content untranslated:
Step 1: Once you have the canonical picked out you can use either rel=”canonical” or a 301 (permanent redirect) from the various localized pages to the canonical URL.
Step 2: On the canonical URL, specify the language-specific duplicated content with different boilerplate via the rel=”alternate” link tag, using its
hreflang attribute. This way, Google can show the correctly-localized variant of your URLs to our international users.We realize this can be a little complicated, so if you have questions, please ask in our webmaster forum!
this is a topic published in 2013... to get contents for your blog or your forum, just contact me at: devnasser@gmail.com
from web contents: How to start a multilingual site 2013
salam every one, this is a topic from google web master centrale blog: Have you ever thought of creating one or several sites in different languages? Let's say you want to start a travel site about backpacking in Europe, and you want to offer your content to English, German, and Spanish speakers. You'll want to keep in mind factors like site structure, geographic as well as language targeting, and content organization.
Site structure
The first thing you'll want to consider is if it makes sense for you to buy country-specific top-level domains (TLD) for all the countries you plan to serve. So your domains might be ilovebackpacking.co.uk, ichlieberucksackreisen.de, and irdemochilero.es.es. This option is beneficial if you want to target the countries that each TLD is associated with, a method known as geo targeting. Note that this is different from language targeting, which we will get into a little more later. Let's say your German content is specifically for users from Germany and not as relevant for German-speaking users in Austria or Switzerland. In this case, you'd want to register a domain on the .de TLD. German users will identify your site as a local one they are more likely to trust. On the other hand, it can be pretty expensive to buy domains on the country-specific TLDs, and it's more of a pain to update and maintain multiple domains. So if your time and resources are limited, consider buying one non-country-specific domain, which hosts all the different versions of your website. In this case, we recommend either of these two options:
Geographic targeting vs. Language targeting
As mentioned above, if your content is especially targeted towards a particular region in the world, you can use the Set Geographic Target tool in Webmaster Tools. It allows you to set different geographic targets for different subdirectories or subdomains (e.g., /de/ for Germany).
If you want to reach all speakers of a particular language around the world, you probably don't want to limit yourself to a specific geographic location. This is known as language targeting, and in this case, you don't want to use the geographic target tool.
Content organization
The same content in different languages is not considered duplicate content. Just make sure you keep things organized. If you follow one of the site structure recommendations mentioned above, this should be pretty straightforward. Avoid mixing languages on each page, as this may confuse Googlebot as well as your users. Keep navigation and content in the same language on each page.
If you want to check how many of your pages are recognized in a certain language, you can perform a language-specific site search. For example, if you go to google.de and do a site search on google.com, choose the option below the search box to only display German results.
If you have more questions on this topic, you can join our Webmaster Help Group to get more advice.
this is a topic published in 2013... to get contents for your blog or your forum, just contact me at: devnasser@gmail.com
Site structure
The first thing you'll want to consider is if it makes sense for you to buy country-specific top-level domains (TLD) for all the countries you plan to serve. So your domains might be ilovebackpacking.co.uk, ichlieberucksackreisen.de, and irdemochilero.es.es. This option is beneficial if you want to target the countries that each TLD is associated with, a method known as geo targeting. Note that this is different from language targeting, which we will get into a little more later. Let's say your German content is specifically for users from Germany and not as relevant for German-speaking users in Austria or Switzerland. In this case, you'd want to register a domain on the .de TLD. German users will identify your site as a local one they are more likely to trust. On the other hand, it can be pretty expensive to buy domains on the country-specific TLDs, and it's more of a pain to update and maintain multiple domains. So if your time and resources are limited, consider buying one non-country-specific domain, which hosts all the different versions of your website. In this case, we recommend either of these two options:
- Put the content of every language in a different subdomain. For our example, you would have en.example.com, de.example.com, and es.example.com.
- Put the content of every language in a different subdirectory. This is easier to handle when updating and maintaining your site. For our example, you would have example.com/en/, example.com/de/, and example.com/es/.
Geographic targeting vs. Language targeting
As mentioned above, if your content is especially targeted towards a particular region in the world, you can use the Set Geographic Target tool in Webmaster Tools. It allows you to set different geographic targets for different subdirectories or subdomains (e.g., /de/ for Germany).
If you want to reach all speakers of a particular language around the world, you probably don't want to limit yourself to a specific geographic location. This is known as language targeting, and in this case, you don't want to use the geographic target tool.
Content organization
The same content in different languages is not considered duplicate content. Just make sure you keep things organized. If you follow one of the site structure recommendations mentioned above, this should be pretty straightforward. Avoid mixing languages on each page, as this may confuse Googlebot as well as your users. Keep navigation and content in the same language on each page.
If you want to check how many of your pages are recognized in a certain language, you can perform a language-specific site search. For example, if you go to google.de and do a site search on google.com, choose the option below the search box to only display German results.
this is a topic published in 2013... to get contents for your blog or your forum, just contact me at: devnasser@gmail.com
from web contents: New markup for multilingual content 2013
salam every one, this is a topic from google web master centrale blog: Many websites serve users from around the world. There are different approaches to serving content appropriate to your users' language and/or region. Last year, we launched support for explicit annotations for web pages rendering the same content with different language templates.
Today we're going further with our support for multilingual content with improved handling for these two scenarios:
Optionally, for pages that have substantially the same content in the same language and are targeted at multiple countries, you may use the rel="canonical" link element to specify your preferred version. We’ll use that signal to focus on that version in search, while showing the local URLs to users where appropriate. For example, you could use this if you have the same product page in German, but want to target it separately to users searching on the Google properties for Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.
Update: to simplify implementation, we no longer recommend using rel=canonical.
Keep in mind that all of these annotations are to be used on a per-URL basis. You should take care to use the specific URL, not the homepage, for both of these link elements.
this is a topic published in 2013... to get contents for your blog or your forum, just contact me at: devnasser@gmail.com
Today we're going further with our support for multilingual content with improved handling for these two scenarios:
- Multiregional websites using substantially the same content. Example: English webpages for Australia, Canada and USA, differing only in price
- Multiregional websites using fully translated content, or substantially different monolingual content targeting different regions. Example: a product webpage in German, English and French
Specifying language and location
We've expanded our support of the rel="alternate" hreflang link element to handle content that is translated or provided for multiple geographic regions. The hreflang attribute can specify the language, optionally the country, and URLs of equivalent content. By specifying these alternate URLs, our goal is to be able to consolidate signals for these pages, and to serve the appropriate URL to users in search. Alternative URLs can be on the same site or on another domain.Annotating pages as substantially similar content
Update: to simplify implementation, we no longer recommend using rel=canonical.
Example usage
To explain how it works, let’s look at some example URLs:- http://www.example.com/ - contains the general homepage of a website, in Spanish
- http://es-es.example.com/ - is the version for users in Spain, in Spanish
- http://es-mx.example.com/ - is the version for users in Mexico, in Spanish
- http://en.example.com/ - is the generic English language version
If you specify a regional subtag, we’ll assume that you want to target that region.
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="es" href="http://www.example.com/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="es-ES" href="http://es-es.example.com/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="es-MX" href="http://es-mx.example.com/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="http://en.example.com/" />
Keep in mind that all of these annotations are to be used on a per-URL basis. You should take care to use the specific URL, not the homepage, for both of these link elements.
More help
As always, if you need more help correctly implementing multiregional and multilingual websites, please see our Help Center article about this topic, or ask in our Webmaster Help Forum.this is a topic published in 2013... to get contents for your blog or your forum, just contact me at: devnasser@gmail.com