Google advises on multilingual website design

11/08/2008

A number of tips on how to go about creating a multilingual website have been offered by Charlene Perez and Juliane Stiller of the Google search quality team.

The two experts said on the search engine's Webmaster Central Blog that it would be wise for designers to take into account factors such as site structure, geographic targeting and content organisation when it comes to developing a site with content in several languages.

They advised developers to make use of top-level domain names specific to each country and to create sub-domains for content in each of the different languages used, as well as recommending the use of Google's Set Geographic Target tool.

"Avoid mixing languages on each page, as this may confuse Googlebot as well as your users," Ms Perez and Ms Stiller commented.

"Keep navigation and content in the same language on each page."

The post follows a recent announcement from Google stating that webmasters may want to consider avoiding "infinite space" in their website design.

This phrase refers to instances where the Googlebot comes across pages with large numbers of links that do not lead to new content, such as 'next month' links in online calendars.