Article : Drupal multi-language SEO

As mentioned before, Drupal has quite nice out-of-the-box SEO features which can be improved using the right modules. There even is a handy SEO checklist module which not only tells you about these modules, but also other things - like w3c compliance.

Multiple languages
However, things become a little complicated when you use a multi-lingual setup of Drupal. The case I’m describing here is Drupal 5.x with i18n. Things will probably be a little easier in Drupal 6 because of its better multi-language support, but in Drupal 5 and i18n you have to watch out for some things.

Pathauto
There is a problem with pathauto in combination with i18n. Pathauto doesn’t take the current-language into account. So you can’t have a node with a translation having the same url - even though the URL isn’t the same because it starts with the language prefix!

Example:
This is how pathauto would solve this problem now for a node with title ‘example’:

• Dutch version page: /nl/node/example
• English version page: /en/node/example-0

It will add a ‘-0′ string to make the second url different. Which is actually not necessary because you can see the url is already different because of the language prefix.

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Courtesy : Blog.merge.nl