How do I create canonical meta tags for mutli-lingual websites to improve SEO?

Question

I have a company website (Visual Studio / VB / ASP.NET 4.0) and it's now localized in 10 different languages.

The problem: My URLs do NOT change when switching from, say, English to Swedish. Only the text changes, as it calls the information from the "sv" resource file instead of the "en" resource file. Stefan noted that this will not count against me for duplicate content.

But Tiggerito came up with an excellent suggestion. He suggested I use canonical tags in the section to intimate to SE bots that I have other languages. I'd like to follow his suggestion, and add canonical tags to my master pages.

Can anybody tell me how I can go about doing this? What would the tags look like, and would I have to have one for en, es-MX, ru, sv, fr, etc.? Thanks for any guidance you can offer!

Answer 1

First of all its not good SEO to have the same page, same url, with totally different content. You confuse the search engines that do not know what to show. What search machine index to show ? what language of all. This is not count as duplicate content but indexer see you like to change the page and the language too often and do not what to show.

Second, the canonical tag works only for google from what I know, and second its not take language as an argument. The canonical tag works the different way connect many different url with similar content to the one url, not split one url to many different contents.

Is better to have you home page your default language, and when you change language to change the url, or add a url parameter.

Here is a canonical tag.

<link rel="canonical" href="http://example.com/page.html"/>

About canonical tags
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/canonical-link-tag/
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/12/handling-legitimate-cross-domain.html

Notes

In this url that @JasonWeber give me

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/03/working-with-multilingual-websites.html

say it very clear: if you’re going to localize, make it visible in the search results
and "And last but not least, keep the content for each language on separate URLs - don't use cookies to show translated versions."