It is harmful to have meaningless languages for a country?

[miltokas]

Hi there,

I have a store that has 4 languages.

I have a couple of questions:

Is there any advantage in letting the Primary Market as default instead of creating subfolders?

When organizing the markets and using subfolders, for example for Australia, does it make sense to leave languages like German, French and Spanish for this market? If I leave it, does it harm in someway?

Thanks for your support!

[sahilsharma9515]

Hi @miltokas 

1. It use to be a good practice if primary market is set as default, the advantage for having this is when a customer will land from other countries than the one you have already listed then they will see the default language on your store.

2. If you want to leave other market then there will be no harm, there will be no issues with your store, so you don't need to be worry about that.

Hopefully it will help you. If yes then Please don't forget hit Like and Mark it as solution!

Best Regards

Sahil

[michaelivanov]

Hi @miltokas,

There is no SEO-related harm when adding additional languages to your Markets.

To maximize your store for SEO in this case I'd recommend 

1. adding all of your languages to your primary Market (unless there's a specific need  to do otherwise)

2. switching from four-letter language codes like "/fr-eu" to two-letter language codes like "/fr" (unless there's a specific need for four-letter language codes) by going to your secondary Markets' Languages and domains section and then clicking on "Manage domains"

After selecting "Use primary market configuration" your respective Market will use two-letter language codes

Repeat this for every secondary Market to apply two-letter language codes to every Market.

Note that this is the second-best option for SEO. The best option would be to buy local domains like venga-store.fr if possible (this can be better SEO-wise but could be worse brand-wise but the latter is only the case for established brands. That is partly why big branded stores like nike.com rather use nike.com/fr instead of nike.fr for example).

Subdomains like fr.venga-store.com would be the third-best option since there's a risk that Google will see it as a separate entity which won't be the case with subdirectories like "/fr" or local domains like ".fr".

To make sure that your visitors automatically see your store in their preferred language (which is their browser language) no matter which Market they're currently in I'd additionally recommend enabling automatic redirects based on your visitor's browser language which you can do with e.g. Langify inside the Langify Switcher Configurator

Let me know if you have any further questions regarding this.

[miltokas]

Hi @michaelivanov 

Thanks a lot for your detailed feedback.

I agree with you, I rather have a two-letter language codes but the issue with the proposed solution is that if I chose to use the primary market configuration for France, I won't be able to set /fr as the default for this market as Shopify will take the primary market configuration, which is English.

Is there a way to select the venga-store.com/fr as the default url for this secondary market?

Thanks a lot!

[michaelivanov]

This isn't possible with Shopify Markets yet however the "Automatic Language Detection" feature in Langify takes the complexity out of this by letting you have two-letter language codes (which are generally easier to set up, maintain and debug) while ensuring that your visitors see your store in the language that matches their browser language which is not just equivalent to setting e.g. the French language as the default language for the French Market but better because the browser language is already an explicit preference set by the visitor, unlike their geolocation which can vary e.g. if a visitor goes on vacation or takes a business trip to another country.

Even in my case, my browser language (English) doesn't match the country I'm currently residing in (Germany).

Note that because Shopify sets your hreflang tags automatically from their end they may have to be adjusted manually afterward.

In this case, just email Langify at support@langify-app.com to add this adjustment to your theme for you.

Let me know if you have any further questions regarding this.