I know that there are lots of docs about multi-languages website, but still cannot find a solution for my problem:

I'm building a website to help people to learn Italian. The site contains pages with Italian dialogs with the English translation:

enter image description here

How should I implement SEO for a page like that?

I know a page should have the text in only one language, and the URL structure should respect that language, but in this case the languages are Italian and English, so what should I do to avoid the conflict?

Maybe I could hide the English text and load it dynamically with AJAX?

  • I think there are numerous ways to do it, but what you need to keep in mind is that the content must be in good quality and that people must understand what the page is about just from reading the text alone. – Mike Apr 4 '16 at 21:26
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    If this is all there is to the page, it would be considered thin content anyway. If this is the case, it would be best not allowing search engines to index these pages at all. – closetnoc Apr 4 '16 at 22:25

As this page is for people that can speak English and want to learn Italian, the URL path as well as most parts of the content (the header, the navigation, the footer, etc.) should be in English.

If you care about semantic HTML, you should use lang="en" on the html element, and lang="it" on the elements that contain the Italian translation.

I don’t agree with the suggestions to disallow indexing of these pages. People search for translations (e.g., "how is it going Italian") and you might want to rank for such queries. And people that know your site might want to search for a specific page on your site, using an external search engine (e.g., "site:example.com/italian/ how is it going"). Both of these use cases wouldn’t be possible if you noindex these pages.


How should I SEO a page like that?

you should firstly think about: what SEO value has the page? To be honest, the answer would be: nearly zero.

then you should think about users, who maybe are looking for your page. What they are looking for? Which are keywords? How high (rather low) is the search volume of those keywords?

Not every page needs to be optimized. Not every page has a value. I would noindex such pages. I would rather optimize a page, where you explain, what a unique proposition has your language studying tool, for a keywords like "learn italian online"

  • To be more clear that is the only content of the page. The page contain many mini dialogs that should help to practice the language (the image show only one dialog). – Alessandro DS Apr 5 '16 at 8:26
  • So I think that the page has some value for the user (who whant "learn/practice italian online"). But those page are difficult to SEO, then maybe a possible SEO improvement is to create some other pages (in english) that explain the "value" of those dialogs. Does it sound right? – Alessandro DS Apr 5 '16 at 8:36
  • i think, learning pages with dialogs should not be indexed - i can't imagine the cause for searching of such page... Let learning pages better noinxdex, and build a SEO world around learn italian online – Evgeniy Apr 5 '16 at 9:27

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