Hello SEOs,
we are soon planning to move one of our brand websites with language-country folders to a new content management system.
Unfortunately, only the pages for some countries will migrate, the rest will remain in the old cms.
The problem: We have a really long list of hreflang links (56), which are now split between two different cms - but under the same domain.
And since the two cms do not exchange the hreflang links with each other, the old list becomes shorter and shorter and the new one slowly gets longer as soon as more countries are moved into the new cms (I am sure this will take months or a year or even more?).
Has anyone had this case before?
Does anyone have a solution on how to exchange the hreflangs between the two systems?
Can Google handle this?
I look forward to helpful advice and tips!
Thank you + kind regards, Corinna
Hello @Corinna,
Google can use 3 methods to indicate alternative pages:
HTML;
HTTP headers;
Sitemap.
It is entirely possible for the internationalization process to take place in two CMSs. It can even occur on different domains (.com, .com.br, .co.uk, etc.) or subdomains (.com, br.xxx.com, fr.xxx.com, etc.).
The technical challenge is to integrate, within each CMS, a field where the person publishing the texts can choose the base text. Each language version must list itself in addition to all others.
For example, you can have an English news site translated into 11 other languages. I, as a translator, would have to insert the URL referring to the English article that I am translating into the CMS. The other translators would do the same.
This way, all translations would reference the same text in a single database. The translation information would then be distributed among the different CMSs.
What can make the operation more complex is if there is no default language. In other words, I could translate a text from English to Portuguese or from Spanish to Portuguese. More complex, more possible.
Websites like beincrypto.com and perhaps cointelegraph.com operate this way.
I leave the link to the related documentation below:
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/specialty/international/localized-versions