How does Weglot manage the SEO

In this article, you'll find how Weglot manages the SEO to be sure all the versions of your website will be indexed by Google.

Weglot is following the best practices in terms of multilingual SEO, however, 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 setup Weglot on your website according to our integration guides, you have 2 possibilities:

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

- The subdomain integration provides multilingual SEO benefits as you can see below

Multilingual SEO best practices guidelines (as per Google here https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en) requires to include the following key aspects:

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

With this system, your website will have URLs like [language code].yourwebsite.com (for instance fr.yourwebsite.com).

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 on your translated pages.
These tags let Google know you have different versions of the same page and favor indexing 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

Weglot translates content on the server-side, meaning 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 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 all the best practices of Google and therefore, with Weglot, all your translated pages will also be indexed and displayed to foreign visitors, without any additional work from the owner of the website.

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 isn't able to add the relative URLs to the hreflang tags in the original version only.

It means that on subpages (not on the homepage) and only into the original version source, the hreflang tags won't contain the relative URL.

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

Google seems to understand that the original and translated pages are related and so 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