Internal linking between different subdomains

[bernard]

What is the best practice of linking between different country level domains?

Say I have "site.com" and launch "uk.site.com".

Linking from the footer with a country flag, front page to front page, is what I see most of.

That isn't very good for funneling relevance or links though. I was thinking about linking in the footer, but also linking from the bottom of each individual post to the corresponding post on the other side. Make a custom field in Wordpress. "Read this article in other languages" and then have a flag, but also the title of the post in the language linked to.

Then of course the Hreflang tag, but that supposedly doesn't transfer link value.

By the way, would a subdomain linked like this, included hreflang and search console, be treated as a brand new domain or could it get some trust from being on a trusted main domain already?

 

[Ryuzaki]

I'm not experienced with multi-language sites but I do like the idea adding something to the loop so it automatically links each post to the same post on the other sub-domains. I probably wouldn't use the post title, I'd just use the flags but change the alt name to the name of the post in the other language. Custom fields is probably the way to go.

Subdomains are treated as new domains if you link to them you can definitely transfer juice around. That would work out in your favor on all sites except the most juicy, which would be sharing out a lot of juice.

I'm sure there's more to subdomains than "it's flat out just a new domain," which is why all these news sites were taking money to launch coupon sites on subdomains. They must have been getting ranking boosts, even without interlinking.

 

[bernard]

I probably wouldn't use the post title, I'd just use the flags but change the alt name to the name of the post in the other language.

You wouldn't because of user experience or because of anchor text over optimiziation or?

 

[Ryuzaki]

You wouldn't because of user experience or because of anchor text over optimiziation or?

Should have explained my thinking. I don't like the idea of displaying it that way. Seems like it'd be ugly on desktop, worse on mobile as long titles break to the next line, and you can achieve the same result with images. It seems like your point was to make sure you're sending relevancy by using the title as the anchor, but if you use an image as the anchor, Google grabs the alt text to get the context (uses it as the anchor text). Same result, prettier design.

 

[bernard]

Ok, so here is what I did:

1. Added custom fields with ACF to posts and pages

Two custom fields for each language: URL and Alt text. These appear under each post, so not automated, but it will do for now. I then simply paste url to corresponding page on the other subdomains and add the alt text I want (generally the title of the translated post).

2. Wrote a custom shortcode to show flags with links

I use a child theme and add shortcode and associated function in the Functions.php.

I grab the value of the custom fields with get_post_meta() and if exist, I add their values to html code to output using IF statements and simply concatenating a string of my desired a.img output. Then I simply return this html at the end of the function.

3. Add shortcode to footer widget

Having this shortcode in the footer, the country flags with links and alt text show up if the custom fields are not empty. Simple.