Adding A Language To A Shop And Seo

[ericko]

Hi all,

 

I have made a webshop for more than a year and could rank on google's first page. We have been selling abroad for a while. Thus now, we want to set up a new language for the shop. URLs will changes:

 

Now : mysite.fr (french is our main language)

 

After adding english it will be:

French : mysite.fr/fr/

English : mysite.fr/en/

 

My problem is that by adding /fr/ after mysite.fr, does that mean that I will lose all the SEO credits Google gave to mysite.fr when it becomes mysite.fr/fr/ . Will I lose my good ranks?

 

Thank you in advance.

[Alphaloc]

Yes, you will lose rank if you just add a language. You can compensate (and keep most but not all of your rank) if you let search engines know that the page has moved permanently (301 Redirect). There are 2 ways to do that.

 

1. Set your shop's default language to French (should be the case already since it's your only language) and In Preferences -> SEO & URLs set "Redirect to the canonical URL" to "301 - Permanently moved". That way, whenever someone tries to reach yourshop.fr/category_x/product_y they will be canonically redirected to yourshop.fr/fr/category_x/product_y. Since it's a 301 redirect, you will keep most of your ranking. (mind you, 302 redirects don't do this) Problem with his method is that it's based on a prestashop bug (at least in my opinion) because language redirects should actually happen with a 302 redirect, no matter what.
2. So maybe the better way is to manually configure server redirects on your server that will redirect all pages that have no language set (where the 'xx/' is missing in yourshop.fr/xx/...) to yourshop.fr/fr/... Best to consult your server documentation to see how you best take care of that.