A website in several languages without sabotaging yourself
One address per language, tags that declare the correspondences, and a title of its own for each version: the three rules of a multilingual site that does not cannibalise itself. Beginners' SEO series, part eight.
In Switzerland, the question comes up quickly: should the site speak German, French, Italian, English? As soon as the answer includes two of them, a particular mechanism takes over, and mistakes cost more here than elsewhere because they multiply by the number of languages.
One language, one address
First rule, drawn from the documentation on multi-regional and multilingual sites: each language version lives at its own address. your-site.ch/fr/ and your-site.ch/de/, or separate domains, the formula does not matter, as long as each language has its own. What you must never do is serve different languages at the same address depending on the visitor, by detecting their language or their location: Google’s crawler explores mostly from the United States, it would see only one of the versions, and the others would exist for nobody. Offering a language switch, yes; imposing one through automatic redirection, no.
Declaring the correspondences
Second rule: tell Google that the French page and the German page are the same page in two languages. This is done through hreflang annotations, documented here, which tie together the versions of a single page. The benefit is direct: Google serves the right language to the right person, and understands that these pages translate each other instead of competing. The annotations must be reciprocal, each version pointing to all the others; that is tedious by hand and it is precisely the kind of thing a decent site builder does on its own. The question to put to your provider fits in one sentence: are the hreflang tags generated, and reciprocal?
Translating what cannot be seen, too
Third rule, the most often neglected: the title and the description of each page, those two lines that part six showed decide the click, must be translated like everything else. The classic defect is a careful translation of the content, with titles and descriptions left in the original language, because they are entered somewhere else in the tool and nobody thought of it. Result: ten German pages all wearing the same French title. For Google, pages with identical titles look alike; for the German-speaking reader, a French title under a German query is a result you do not click.
Translating halfway is worse than not translating
A language version is a commitment: it will be judged as a full site in its own right. Three pages translated out of thirty, forms that fall back into French, half-translated templates make a ghost version that disappoints the visitor and clutters the index. Better two complete languages than four half-done. And the order of languages is a business decision before it is a technical one: you start with the language of your actual clientele, not with English on principle. It is also the rule the workshop applies to its own projects: a version is written, it is not machine-translated.
Next part: the FAQ, or the art of answering the questions people really type.
Who writes these notes
This journal is kept by the workshop that designs and maintains the house’s websites. Everything described here, the Search Console, internal links, the business profile, is part of the work delivered with a site: if you would rather someone took care of it, that is precisely the trade.