SEO and multilingual website with language per domain name

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sahuni's picture
Posted by sahuni on May 5, 2011 at 4:52pm

I would like some comments on basic questions

In a general way,
French being the default, if I have www.myFrench.com and www.myGerman.com, will I have to reference the two? Only the French one? In my point of view, I would like the 2 to be referenced.

If yes (meaning the two are possible)
I can’t see how to do that because it’s same website.
In Google, generally I choose option of putting a validation html file at root of website.
But if I have a second domain name for same website, I just must validate the same validation file and it will works?

xmlsitemap
I must add a second sitemap and say it’s for second language?
But in configuration, /admin/settings/xmlsitemap/settings, there is this field : Default Base url, what must I put there?
(I had a try months ago, but my sitemap was such a mess (mixing languages) that I suppressed the second xmlsitemap).

And what about language neutral?
I have some content types which are not translated and are in language neutral (either waiting for translation team, or not intented at all to be translated). Which side are they supposed to go? in French xmlsitemap or in German xmlsitemap?

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Comments

Could it be that the mixing

Posted by sahuni on May 12, 2011 at 9:27am
sahuni's picture

Could it be that the mixing of xmlsitemap concerning languages came from the fact that node title is same in all languages?
Node title are names of rivers, so it does not change in French or German. If yes, what to do?

Not clear

Posted by kristen pol on January 19, 2012 at 5:47am
kristen pol's picture

It's not very clear from your post how you have it set up. You say you have:

which are separate domains. I assume by "reference" you mean that you want Google to "index" both sites.

Since they have separate domains, then they will both be indexed (as long as an existing indexed site points to it so Google knows it's there or you submit it directly to Google). You don't have to have a sitemap for Google to index your sites. It just can help Google know more about your content.

If you are having issues specifically with getting the xml sitemap configured for different languages, then you should check out the module's issue queue and create an issue if need be:

http://drupal.org/project/issues/xmlsitemap?categories=All

To add your site manually to Google, you can click on Add your URL on Google's Submit your content page.

Good luck!
Kristen