Affect on SEO of culture in URI [closed]

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My site needs to be localised, and currently I am using the format: mysite.com/[two letter ISO country code] - e.g. mysite.com/gb or mysite.com/us for its address. Obviously each application under that directory has content tailored to its audience.

I have since run into the issue of multi-lingual countries, such as Switzerland or Canada. I am fairly confident in how I have solved the problem, however I would like to know the effect on SEO if I change my URL format to be like this: mysite.com/[language code - country code] e.g. mysite.com/en-gb or mysite.com/en-us

If the robots don't care about me having the whole code in there it will make programming for this trivial.

Thank you for the insight!

EDIT - format problem

Answer 1

Speaking as someone with about two years' experience, this would be my expectation:

Upon reworking a site, you're going to have some issues in the beginning, you always will. Every site redesign is going to cause a little change in ranking until the search engine algorithms re-decide how to index your site based on the new content.

Google's algorithm has historically targeted keywords in URIs, so long as they're short and descriptive, and have distinct content. While localization is a plus, especially with unique content, I don't know that I would go with the en-us style format unless there's only one page in English. See if you can come up with a more descriptive way of doing this. Maybe you could consider making subdomains for different languages? i.e. fr.yoursite.com/ca and en.yoursite.com/ca for the French and English versions of the Canadian site.

I would also emphasize that you ought to consider writing completely separate content for the French Canadian and English Canadian versions of your site. Not only will this provide more content, but, for people who speak both languages, this will show your emphasis on the customer. Besides, the culture and way in which you speak to a French Canadian should differ from the way you approach a primarily English-speaking Canadian, eh?

Be sure to use different meta descriptions for each and EVERY one of these pages, too, and possibly a rel-canonical for whichever version you view as your site's core audience.

At the end of the day, SEO isn't about PageRank, it's about the customer. That's what the algorithms have been chasing since the Google Beta in 1999. You want to create content that makes your site worth staying on.

Hope that helped!