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:

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.

The "x-default" tag

The "x-default" hreflang is not necessary for most websites and is not added to your website by Weglot.

This tag is specifically used to indicate which version of your site should be served to users whose language isn't explicitly covered by other hreflang tags. This is typically only needed for a homepage that serves as a language selection page and doesn't match any specific language itself.

If you wish to add it to your website, you can do so manually. We recommend checking the documentation for the technologies used on your website (e.g., your CMS or hosting platform) to understand how to implement this.

For more detailed information, you can also refer to the Hreflang Google documentation. 

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:  

Note that Weglot also translates the "alt" attributes of the <img> tags, corresponding to the alternative text displayed if an image cannot be rendered.

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