How does Weglot manage your website's SEO

In this article, you'll learn how Weglot manages your website's SEO to ensure that all the versions of your website are indexed by Google.

Weglot is following the best practices in terms of multilingual SEO. Some information may be slightly different depending on your integration:

1. I'm using WordPress

2. I'm using Shopify

3. I'm using another integration

Other integration:

When you set Weglot on your website according to our integration guides, you have 3 possibilities:

- The JavaScript integration consists of simply copy-pasting a code snippet into your header. This integration doesn't provide any SEO benefits

- The subdomain integration provides the website's multilingual SEO benefits, as you can see below

- The subdirectory integration also provides the same website's multilingual SEO benefits

Multilingual SEO best practices guidelines (as per Google here) require including the following key aspects:

I. A unique URL for each version of your web page

With the subdomain or subdirectory integrations, your website will have a dedicated URL for the translated pages. It can be [language code].yourwebsite.com (for instance, fr.yourwebsite.com) if you use the subdomain integration or yourwebsite.com/[language code]/ (for instance, yourwebsite.com/fr/) if you use the subdirectory integration.

II. Hreflang tags for Google indexing robots

Weglot provides hreflang tags that you can add to the header of your original version (they will be automatically injected into your translated pages).

These tags let Google know you have different versions of the same page and favor the indexation of these pages.

⚠️ If you are using Webflow or Squarespace, feel free to look at this section

III. Having content translated into the source code and not just dynamically

With the subdomain or subdirectory integrations, Weglot translates content on the server-side. It means that your content is translated in your source code, whereas a JavaScript translation solution would not be seen or indexed by Google.

IV. Detecting and translating your website's SEO tags

Weglot automatically does that on the server side again.

E.g., Meta-description for the English version of the website

E.g. Meta-description for the French version of the website:

Weglot follows Google's best practices for multilingual SEO. Therefore, with Weglot, all your translated pages will be indexed and displayed to foreign visitors without any additional work from the website owner.

The instructions below only concerns the subdomain integration on Webflow and Squarespace

On Webflow and Squarespace, with our subdomain integration, note that by default, Weglot can't add the relative URLs to the hreflang tags in the original version only.

This means that the hreflang tags will not contain the relative URL on subpages (not on the homepage) and only in the original version source.

This relative URL is well-added to the translated version.

Google seems to understand that the original and translated pages are related, so it doesn't penalize the indexation of these pages.

However, we've developed a system to be able to integrate relative URLs into the original version of your category, blog, and product pages:

Webflow: https://github.com/weglot/hook-webflow

Squarespace: https://github.com/weglot/integration-hooks

The process needs to be done on your computer terminal. Do not hesitate to send it to your developer