Hi there,
I'm finishing a multilanguage store and am wondering how I can implement it best.
Should I check one URL for all languages?
Should I check “show language in URL”?
I have a domain with multiple extensions. for example .de and .co.uk
I'm thinking it should be possible to point the .de domain to the German language, and the co.uk to the English language using 301 redirects, right?
(redirect .de to /de for example)
I hope somebody can give me a short explenation on how to do this in the best way possible before we go live.
THANKS!
Hello Flow,
If you have different content on pages in different languages, you should better disable the “Use single URL for all languages” setting or enable the “Show language in the URL” setting in settings of the “SEO” add-on. It is better for search engines if pages with different content have different URLs.
As regards directing different domain names to different languages, you can use redirect rules or some code modification in order to implement it.
—
Pavel Zyukin
CS-Cart Support team
Thanks - all clear now 
Hello Flow,
You are welcome.
—
Pavel Zyukin
CS-Cart Support team
Hi again,
I have another question about this.
I now use seperate directories for each language. ie /en is english
What I'm wondering is: if I just type www.mydomain.com it also shows the website in english (without /en in the domain).
Won't search engines see this as multiple content?
Thanks,
Floris
Hello Floris,
Yes, it can cause a duplicate content issue. Thank you for attention to this problem. We have posted the problem description to our Bug Tracker. Our engineers will consider it at the first opportunity. You can subscribe to updates here: http://forum.cs-cart.com/tracker/issue-2646-seo-add-on-a-duplicate-content-issue/ .
—
Pavel Zyukin
CS-Cart Support team
[quote name='CS-Cart Support team' timestamp='1312204131' post='118634']
Hello Floris,
Yes, it can cause a duplicate content issue. Thank you for attention to this problem. We have posted the problem description to our Bug Tracker. Our engineers will consider it at the first opportunity. You can subscribe to updates here: http://forum.cs-cart.com/tracker/issue-2646-seo-add-on-a-duplicate-content-issue/ .
—
Pavel Zyukin
CS-Cart Support team
[/quote]
Thanks Pavel.
Easiest way to set this up is with just a couple of redirects. I.e. you want to redirect:
domain.fr to Domain Names - Buy a Website Domain - Domain.com
domain.co.uk to Domain Names - Buy a Website Domain - Domain.com
You don't need multiple directories for each language. The SEO stuff will take care of uniquely identifying the pages by language.
[quote name=‘tbirnseth’ timestamp=‘1312244036’ post=‘118653’]
Easiest way to set this up is with just a couple of redirects. I.e. you want to redirect:
domain.fr to Website Domain Names, Online Stores & Hosting - Domain.com
domain.co.uk to Website Domain Names, Online Stores & Hosting - Domain.com
You don’t need multiple directories for each language. The SEO stuff will take care of uniquely identifying the pages by language.
[/quote]
Thanks TB. Still I have a question about this…
If a new user types in: mydomain.com he arrives at the english homepage. If he chooses another language now, the next time he goes to mydomain.com, he will get that language.
So how does this work with SEO? The homepage (without anything behind it) exists in multiple languages with the same URL.
this is the reason i had the language showing in my url… but that also didn’t seem to help.
Flo is confused. 
(and has been watching too many Seinfelds)
What is the setting you have for “show language in url” in your seo settings?
If you're going to run multiple languages, you really want this turned on. Hence, a reference to yourdomain.com will give the english version of this-product and yourdomain.com will give you the french version.
I was only trying to address how to get the home page to initialize to the proper language based on the “landing page” with a language (or country) based domain.
If you look at the seo_names table you'll see that every 'name' has a language associated with it. So you should see entries (from above) like this-product with separate lines for FR and EN language codes.
Once the redirect is done using sl=FR then that will set a cookie for the language in use and you should see the cart language selected as French in the selector. If you change it to English then it will set the cookie to EN and you'll get English translations…
Hope that helps. It's really done pretty well. It just takes a bit to get your head around how to keep the user from having to select the language by using a country based domain name…
Thanks again for your answer, I think you're a bit confused though.
Setting the “show language in url” to on, adds the directory per language (/en, /fr, etc).
I have this turned on right now.
If I turn it off, it does what you say: links that are the same for each language get the language tag added like: yourdomain.com
The question I have is as follows:
How does google handle the main domain? I mean, If a user chooses a language at his first visit, and types in the main domain the next time he visits the site, he gets his own language WITHOUT the /directory or ?sl=XX tag. So the main domain exists with the same URL in multiple languages! Or am I completely missing something here!?
This also causes problems with Facebook like / share stuff: You can like / share both the maindomain.com or maindomain.com/language which means your likes gets shared over multiple pages that are actually the same.
So the problem is not the domain redirects per language, I've got this working just fine. I just redirect co.uk to Domain Names - Buy a Website Domain - Domain.com or to Domain Names - Buy a Website Domain - Domain.com (for a uk domain).
Hope this all makes sense!
Yea, my error.
I believe that Google uses the URL in the address bar to determine uniqueness of URL's. Hence my_domain.com in English ends up being the same index if in French. Without difference, it doesn't know there is a difference based on some other setting. That's why it's best to have the language set in the SEO path name when running a multi-language store.
A page in language 1 is different than the same page in language 2. This should apply to Google Search Engine and Facebook Like's too.
If this doesn't answer your question, please rephrase it with concrete examples.
Hmm… I got this far as well. Thing is… if you use SEO names for your pages and products, you don’t actually seem to need the language in a path since all the pages have a unique URL.
So actually we’re back to where we were! 
The issue that’s still remaining, is that the www.mydomain.com still exists with the same url as many times as you have languages.
So I think it’s best if I simply use directories for each language, and tell the robots not to index www.mydomain.com. This way I don’t have duplicate content issues.
But then the problem is that I won’t score any SEO points! I mean: people will link to the main domain most of the time…
Any ideas?
[quote name='tbirnseth' timestamp='1312525056' post='118904']
All except the home page. That's where the redirect from domain.fr to Domain.com comes in…
[/quote]
Yes… but the redirects from a language domain extension to the homepage are not that important. And people will continue to link to www.maindomain.com which they see in their browser, whether they came from .de or.fr or .co.uk
so like cs-cart says, it's simply a bug. The homepage should not exist in multiple languages with the same URL.
What happens if a malformed or missing value is parsed? Do you just see English?
Seems like no escape from search engines penalties!
Great information TB + Flow!
You mean if a word is missing in one language?
P.S. see this topic for some good info for multi-language sites: [url=“SEO redirect for Home Page - SEO - CS-Cart Community Forums”]SEO redirect for Home Page - SEO - CS-Cart Community Forums
[font=verdana,geneva,sans-serif][size=3]Hi Flow,
I just thought it would be a smart idea to get the language in URL feature working better. As I find it shows up all over the place despite both checkboxes unchecked on the settings page. I’ll have a good read of your link for client sites that may require multiple unique language URL’s to each page.
However, currently I find myself manually removing the “-en” and numeric strings from so many categories (and some products [products are more about client and customer education more than anything! 
])
Please have a read of my idea (and critique it if you will) for what I feel would be a smarter … or practical approach to unique and meaningful SEO URL’s with or without multiple languages… Topic Post Link[/size][/font]
[font=verdana,geneva,sans-serif][size=3]Thanks for your time.[/size][/font]