How to make language and localisation more SEO friendly

Hi. I'm looking for feedback from the community on language selection and search results. If I have a store in two languages, English and French, with English the default language, how can Google's crawler access the French language site? The language selector sets a cookie in order to switch between languages. So the only way to access French language pages is to set a cookie. Can Google do this when crawling? With this method I've noticed a handful of URLs with meta titles in one language and meta descriptions in another. Googlebot is getting confused somehow.

One way around this is to set "SEO friendly URLs with multiple languages enabled". This way the site's base URL is appended with 'en' or 'fr' and the user (and Google's crawler) can navigate between both languages (by directly visiting URLs) without the need for cookies to be set. The only caveat here is that every page, product and category must be translated in order to avoid duplicate content.

Has anyone any thoughts on the most SEO-friendly way to handle localisation in nopCommerce.

(I'm using nopCommerce 3.5 currently).

If you do not want to have different language for your content, why would you want to enable multiple language in the first place? That confuses me. :)

Thanks for your reply @wooncherk but you've misunderstood what I was saying. I do want my content accessible in two different languages. I'm asking what the best approach to achieve this SEO wise?

I've also noticed that if English is my default store language and French secondary, if I visit a French store URL on a browser with cleared cookies I'm redirected to the English language version. This doesn't provide a good user experience. Similarly, if a French language page is indexed in search the user is alway redirected to an English language page (unless you specify that nopCommerce consider the language of their browser. although for most is set in US English). You'd expect, with no cookies set, that by visiting the direct URL of a French language page a cookie would set French as the language and not redirect to English?

mccarrd4 wrote:
Then why do you say "The only caveat here is that every page, product and category must be translated in order to avoid duplicate content"? You are expected to have the content for both languages, where is the duplicate content?

mccarrd4 wrote:
Where did you see this behaviour? If there's language segment in the URL, it'll show the language directly regardless of cookie setting. /FR/ will always show French content. I am interested in knowing where do you see this behavior, because as far as I know, this is not how nopCommerce is written as far as multi-language is concerned.

Hi. The duplicate content issue may arise when you have the language code as part of the URL by enabling the 'SEO friendly URLs with multiple languages' option. You might have a topic called 'Page one' that is in English only. It's URL would be something like site.com/en/page-one/. With SEO friendly URLs with multiple languages enabled the page site.com/fr/page-one/ is also created but populated with default language content. This is expected functionality but may cause duplicate content if secondary language content isn't inputted.

Using the default cookie language select option there's no duplicate content as URLs for secondary languages aren't created until that page, category or topic are translated.

You're correct in saying if the language code is in the URL the user is shown the correct language content (i.e. they're not redirected). I've seen the described behaviour using the default cookie language select method only. If I visit site.com/french-page on a clean browser I'm always redirected to site.com/english-page (as it's the default language). You'd expect that, on the initial visit, nopCommerce would accept site.com/french-page as the intended location and language and set the language as French in the cookie appropriately? I hope I'm making sense?

mccarrd4 wrote:
I don't think there's any solution to this in default nopCommerce behavior. nopCommerce expects that, you should have the content for different languages for all localizable content. What you can do is 404 (in web.config) the missing content in specific language - that's what I can think of now.

mccarrd4 wrote:
I am confused. You are saying in your first sentence that "... if the language code is in the URL the user is shown the correct language content ...", and then you said "... If I visit site.com/french-page on a clean browser I'm always redirected to site.com/english-page ...". These 2 sentences contradicts with each other.

But if what you mean is "if you did not enable SEO-friendly URL, and you visit /fr/content-slug, you are shown the default language content instead", that's the correct behavior. If you did not enable SEO-friendly URL, nopCommerce won't recognize the URL with /fr/ segment.