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How do I use the rel="canonical" tag on a multi-language site ?

by mase857
1 replies
  • SEO
    • |
So I have a website that is in 15 languages , it's not organized in sub-domains , but sub-folders instead. For example .

The main site in english is :

Example Domain

the other sites in french , porturguese and spanish , etc .. will be like

www.example.com/fr/ (french version)
www.example.com/es/ (spanish version)
www.example.com/pt/(portuguese version)

Now here's the issue .. When new content gets posted on my website , it's available in all of those versions , the main posted content will still keep its original language version but the title of the pages , etc .. will be in the language version that it is in , if that makes sense.

The question now is , How can I make sure that even though the same content is available in all these 5 versions , I can use the html canonical tag to use a language version perference of the site . For example , making the french version my preference ? I googled in and they were not too clear .. How should the HTML look for this ? where should it be placed in the html document ?

I am realizing that I might have been suffering from low traffic due to this ... Any good explanation and demonstration of this would be so much appreciated

Ooops .. Also , if I add that canonical tag to content that has already been indexed .. Will google fix the issue to the already indexed content or will it only apply to future content ? Thanks a bunch
#multilanguage #relcanonical #site #tag
  • Profile picture of the author DigitalSuccessAgency
    Hi mase857, Some times it become little difficult to manage different language website and as you have mentioned that your website have 15 different languages available. I am also handling such type of website. In this scenario, "hreflang tag" come into play. If you are running multilingual website it is really important to tell Google which language version is it and that can be done with the help of "hreflang". Below find the usage of hreflang annotation:

    Imagine you have an English language page hosted at Example Domain, with a Spanish alternative at http://es.example.com/. You can indicate to Google that the Spanish URL is the Spanish-language equivalent of the English page in one of three ways:

    HTML link element in header. In the HTML <head> section of Example Domain, add a link element pointing to the Spanish version of that webpage at http://es.example.com/, like this:
    <link rel="alternate" hreflang="es" href="http://es.example.com/" />
    HTTP header. If you publish non-HTML files (like PDFs), you can use an HTTP header to indicate a different language version of a URL:
    Link: <http://es.example.com/>; rel="alternate"; hreflang="es"
    Sitemap. Instead of using markup, you can submit language version information in a Sitemap.
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