We know that search engines are pretty sophisticated when it comes to detecting the languages used on a site or the country that the content is targeting. Ultimately, a search engine's goal is to provide the most relevant content to the searcher and that often meansreturning automatically detected localized content. But what happens when a search enginesends a user to an unintended area of your site? This might be a situation like sending an international user to your main website, rather than their localized version, or even sending them to a page in a language they don't understand or a regionalization for a country they don't live in.
This can be an occasional problem and something you'll want to think about as you optimize your site for international visitors. When it comes to detecting users in different countries or users using browsers in different languages, there are many ways to detect errors like theseand redirect them to the appropriate content. The most common method to provide contentto users based on location is to redirect them based on their IP address and some developers use the default language set in a user's browser to detect and apply the user's preferred language.
Technically, this is a very straightforward thing to achieve and it's not really the scope of this course, but more importantly, from an SCO perspective, detecting a user's location or language automatically could have implications for your search engine visibility and how these engines detect and understand your content. We know search engines discover content by crawling and indexing your site and what we need to remember here is that crawlers are not browsers. This mean that they don't send the same information to a web server that a browser could, like the language installed on a user's machine.
In the case of Google, the crawlers originate from Google servers, which could be locatedanywhere in the world. So you have to understand, that if you're relying solely on auto-detection, rather than on links and a structure that crawlers can follow, your international content may not be found if you redirect by location or by language. It's also important to remember that search engines have been quite vocal about warning site owners not to usewhat are known as cloaking methods to serve one type of content to users and another to search engines. While clearly not intended to trick the search engines in this fashion, these technically employ the same techniques.
So you'll want to make sure that any auto-detection methods being used allow search engine bots access to the entire site. And this isn't just for search engines. You also need to acknowledge that you don't automatically know what language or location a user wants to browse your site in. For example, when I'm traveling in France and I go to a travel website, it will default to a France regionalization and the French language. While I do speak more than one language, my four years of high school French aren't considered one of them and I need a quick way that I can get back to a language I can work with and there's a few things you can do here.
First, you should make sure other language or country versions are available and visible in a language or country selector or some other visible navigational element. User experience best practices recommend that this is typically in the top right part of the website's design and is often associated with flag icons and language codes. This will help both your users find their way and search engines to easily discover other versions. And make sure that you're not hiding these language and country selectors in images, flash, or other content that's not able to be crawled very easily.
And to avoid all doubt, make sure that your international content exists in the site maps that you build and submit to search engines as well as through text links that crawlers can easily find and follow. Last, don't forget that you'll also want to make it easy for visitors to retain their choices for future visits and that could mean setting cookies or tying these preferences to user account information. Creating a positive experience will go a long way in attracting and retaining search visitors and the ways in which you accomplish this are important.
Detecting what you can in search friendly ways and providing users with an easy way to find the language or regional pages they need are the key. And having the information accessibleto search engines will help them crawl and index all of your content.
0 nhận xét:
Đăng nhận xét