One webmaster in John Mueller’s 09/24/2021 hangout was curious about a Spanish-version website they are working on.
The webmaster was concerned about showing users the wrong page based on their language, and they weren’t sure if they had the right technical implementation in place before they went live.
John explained that the webmaster would probably want to use a banner with JavaScript in order to track where a wrong user may be and use it to redirect the user to the right language page.
They could get a user there faster than using server-side redirects.
If you use a server-side redirect, then you risk showing only the redirected version to the user rather than the correct version.
With the banner approach, you have the opportunity to show the correct page to the right user more often.
This exchange takes place at the 21:25 point in the video:
John Mueller 09/24/2021 Hangout Transcript:
Yes, we are planning to release the Spanish version for the US market. And we already have a multi-language website and around 92 countries and 70 languages. However, when it comes to the U.S., you know, there’s google.com. And we have a lot of traffic coming from brand keywords, mostly, that’s the biggest amount of traffic. And we have some concerns about the impact of this, we have a comprehensive hreflang solution in the sitemaps, and also page language for each page we are going to release by the CMS. However, we still had this kind of shyness to go live since probably the traffic to the brand keywords. And that is the majority could be measured in the search results. You have any additional advice that we should consider regarding this opening up for the Spanish speaker in the US?
John 22:37
So are you seeing any issues at the moment? Or is it more kind of with regards to future plans?
Webmaster 4 22:45
Yeah, I mean, there, I will say that some products and they even have any translation that then the branding is the same. So probably we will have some cases that it’s show up more traffic to the results to the English than to Spanish or vice versa. So our biggest concern is if we should consider additional technical requirements, or maybe make some kind of alterations to the Spanish content to be sure that they are positioned by the cells with some other relevance down that content in English.
John 23:24
Okay, but do you have the Spanish content already? Or is it…?
Webmaster 4 23:29
No, it’s planning to go live in October.
John 23:32
Okay. So I think the things that you mentioned, they sound great. So that seems like a good approach. One, one thing I would try to do, I don’t know if it’s possible in your specific case, it would be to add a JavaScript-based banner to these pages to try to recognize if the wrong user is on the wrong version of the page. So if that’s something, I don’t know if that’s possible here, but to recognize maybe the browser language or the user’s location with JavaScript, and if you can tell that they’re on the wrong version, then show a little banner on top saying, “Hey, we have a better version for you, you can follow the link here.” Using a banner like that means that Google will still be able to index all of these pages. But you can guide users to the appropriate one a little bit faster. If you were to do it on the server side, for example, with a redirect, then the problem could be that Googlebot never sees the other version because it always gets redirected. And the banner is kind of like a backup plan where usually hreflang will help maybe geo-targeting is set up. But the banner is kind of like well, we can’t guarantee that only the right users go to these pages. So we will catch them and then help to find the right ones.
Webmaster 4 25:01
Yeah, we already have implemented geo-targeting for [inaudible].com. And for example, now I’m in Sweden. So the traffic goes directly to this Swedish market. And when it comes to the U.S., it is just one version, I mean one side. And usually, people whose use in the web browsers have maybe from the web browser and interface in Google might change the results.
John 25:31
I would just assume that sometimes users get to the wrong page because everything around geo-targeting and hreflang is sometimes a bit flexible with regards to how we recognize it and how users are set up. So that’s mostly why I would recommend the banner as a backup, but otherwise, I think, you understand the topic, and you probably have it set up so that it’ll work.
