Member Avatar for london-G

Hi Guys,

I have developed a multi language website and basically the urls are all in English. I remember reading an article which mentioned that urls did not much have importance with SEO.

I am now starting to wonder if that's really the case?

What are you thoughts?

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by almostbob

Dani AI

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Short answer for : translate URL slugs when you can afford good, human translations — they improve user trust and click-throughs for local audiences even though their direct ranking impact is small. Content remains the main ranking signal (as said), but readable, localized URLs help users and can be the tie-breaker when everything else is equal. See Google’s guidance on language-specific URLs and hreflang. (developers.google.com)

If you decide to translate slugs, follow these practical rules: keep slugs short and hyphen-separated, translate page titles/meta along with the slug, choose a clear URL strategy (ccTLD / subfolder / subdomain) based on business needs, and tell search engines about the variants with hreflang. Words in URLs are a very light ranking signal (John Mueller) — useful for clarity, not a silver bullet. See Backlinko for slug best practices and SEJ for the John Mueller context. (backlinko.com)

Quick implementation checklist:

  • Pick one URL pattern and stick to it site-wide (subfolders are simplest to manage).
  • Add reciprocal rel="alternate" hreflang annotations for each language/version.
  • Translate on-page content and metadata, not just the slug.
  • If slugs already exist in English, measure CTR/engagement before changing them.

Example hreflang snippet to add in <head> (use the exact URLs you will serve):

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="https://example.com/en/page" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr" href="https://example.com/fr/page" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="https://example.com/" />

Refer to Google’s hreflang documentation for details. (developers.google.com)

If changing live URLs, do it carefully: implement 301 redirects from old → new, set or check rel=canonical, update sitemaps, resubmit in Search Console and monitor coverage and performance (don’t flip URLs site-wide without testing). Google documents canonicalization and redirect best practices that should be followed during any URL change. (developers.google.com)

Further reading:

Member Avatar for almostbob

Content is king, nothing else matters

any uri that is readable will be indexed
logical structured uri make it easier for people, and faster to index

the language(s) the site is written in, English
the OS underlying the language, English
English rules the computer world, the blokes who began it spoke English, and its easier to keep

content languages will be indexed, in that language as long as header/directive referencing the language is correct, or if the language is unique enough that the bot can determine it from structure
If there is no language directive, other languages may be determined by SEBots to be misspelled English

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