Hi Ivan,

If you have separate domains per language, personally I’d say you don’t need to worry about automatic language switching at all.

Otherwise, if there’s a clear majority language in one location, I tend to use location for default language switching, if there’s not (e.g. countries that speak 3 languages), then browser language is a good alternative. Either can work well.

All the best,

Martin

Hi Steven,

Thanks for posting. Given that you’ve already got country specific domains set-up, I would personally recommend 301 redirecting the sub-domains on your .eu domain to the specific domains instead. Currently you have the same content on 2 different domains and this can definitely be an issue. Google tries to make each result unique, so it’s very likely that they will only show ONE of the two results in their search results, therefore there’s no advantage of having it in 2 different places.

The disadvantage is that the number of links going to your site is one of the ranking factors and if you have the content on 2 separate websites, then any fully organic links or social shares you get will be split between these 2 sites, meaning you’re less likely to rank as highly in the search results than if they all go to one site.

Regarding the default language to use, it’s essential each language has its own home page with its own URL. For example, if someone has set Google to show French results and they’re in Switzerland, then Google will show the French version of your home page in the search results in all likelihood.

Also make sure it’s easy to change language, as with some sites it’s impossible as they keep reverting to the default URL, which is very annoying. Regarding which language to choose as the default, either go with the one with the highest search volume, or simply the one that most people speak. If that doesn’t give a clear winner, the alternative of basing it on the browser language is also absolutely fine.

Hope this helps!

There are two things till unclear to me, and perhaps you or someone els reading this knows how to deal with this.

1/ We started out with a .eu domain, hosting all languages in a subdirectory. the pages directly under the root get the x-default attribute value, the ones in the language subdirectories get the alternate ones. So far, so good.
Then, we introduced country specific websites. Not necessarily because of SEO, but because we think a .fr domain still does better in France than a .eu, likewise for a .de in Germany and so on. But at that point I think we introduced the problem of duplicate content (or didn’t we)? During last year, I’ve read on many articles that I should bother about duplicate content as long it’s on different domains (e.g. domain.nl/xyz.html & domain.eu/nl/xyz.html). But today I read on https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en the opposite. Also, is canonical url still relevant?

It feels like SEO and and having a country specific TLD for building up trust are not aligned well. What is the way to go here?

2/ Related to the question above, I wonder what language to use as a default on the homepage of country specific domains. E.g. In Belgium, Dutch or French? In Switzerland, French, German or Italian? or dynamically switch according to the Accept-Language header value sent by the browser? And in the latter case, what will google do?

Lots of questions about this, and from what I notice in the google console, I haven’t found the answer yet, so if anyone has ideas to share, I’m all ears!

I support Martin. We have a strong website in English (Ahrefs ranks 4500), and some of the languages rank well (German, Russian, and Portuguese) while others do not (Chinese and Japanese).

Hi Karel, thanks for your comment. Please can you let me know some examples of the sites that are ranking well without strong language specific links? My experience when launching a multilingual site is that some language specific links are essential (with a few quality links making much more difference than many low quality links).