Hi, I’ve read up quite a bit on various ways of implementing multilingual sites in EE2, and I’ve more or less got my site up and running using a combination of this method and Apache mod_rewrite.
However, SEO is very important for the site I am building, so I need to make sure a couple of things happen:
1. all URLs are in both Spanish and English, depending on which language you are currently in
2. each page has only 1 canonical URL per language to avoid duplicate content issues
This has proved to be a little tricky on a couple of fronts and I just wanted to get some input to see if anyone has any tips.
For example, with categories, my current url structure works like this:
http://www.example.com/places/categories/category/restaurants
I need this url to be the same, but in Spanish, like so:
http://www.example.com/lugares/categorias/categoria/restaurantes
What is the best way to make all these url segments multilingual? Should I duplicate the template_group/template set or should I use mod_rewrite to achieve the first part of the URL?
And what about categories? I can use a combination of category_id’s and Freebie to achieve multilingual category names. For example, I can get the following to point to the same place:
http://www.example.com/lugares/categorias/C2/restaurantes
http://www.example.com/places/categories/C2/restaurants
That’s ok. However, Freebie will just ignore anything after the category_id (C2) so it’s tough to get a canonical url out of this, since I can access the same url at:
http://www.example.com/places/categories/C2/any/words/here
I could rewrite all the categories with mod_rewrite but this would be a huge hassle and not very practical.
I wonder how everyone else is solving these issues. This is my first site with EE so I don’t purport to be any sort of expert.
Cheers,
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