· 4 min read

A bilingual Arabic-English website: avoiding common SEO mistakes

Adding a second language widens your audience but also multiplies the chances of error. These are the most frequent.

Give each language its own URL

Serving both languages on one URL based on cookies or browser settings stops Google indexing one of them. Put Arabic and English on separate paths, such as the root and /en/.

Link the two editions with hreflang

hreflang tells Google the two pages are the same content in two languages, so each user sees the right one. Each page must reference the other and itself, or the tags are ignored.

Don't auto-redirect by browser language

Automatic redirects can hide one edition from Google's crawlers and annoy visitors who want the other language. A clear switch button is better.

Write Arabic, don't translate it literally

Literal translation produces headlines no one searches for. Find the words your Arabic audience actually uses, which often differ from English equivalents.

A title and description for every page in every language

An English page with an Arabic title, or the reverse, is a common template-copying error. Review titles and descriptions by hand after each release.

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