Anchor text for internal links pointing to different languages

[MaximB93]

Hi there,

We're working with a multi domain strategy (one domain / country in the EU). In all domains, we have the same 'feature pages'.

Let's say we have feature page X in the UK, then we also have a version of that feature page on our .fr domain.

In the header of the websites, we have a language switcher which will point you to the correct cTLD. (.es, .eu, .de, etc). These switchers always point you to the local version of that same page.

So, let's say I'm viewing mydomain.de/feature-x, then in the navigation I would have for the 'French' language a link to mydomain.fr/feature-x.

Now, my question is, in the anchor text of these links, we always have the name of the country.

So, mydomain.de/feature-x would link to mydomain.fr/feature-x in the header navigation with the anchor text 'Français'. This means that all feature pages ( = money / SEO pages) have internal links with countries in the anchor.

Is there a best practice for this? I thought of maybe adding the anchor rather than the country in the php files, and then swap these out with the name of the country with javascript on pageLoad (thus, Google would only see the anchor text optimised link) and the end user would see the country.

Opinions? Happy to hear from you guys.

 

[tiiberius]

We are probably talking about massive amount of pages.

Some should contain money anchors but not all. Making them all like that might lead to over-optimization issues.

 

[MaximB93]

We are probably talking about massive amount of pages.

Some should contain money anchors but not all. Making them all like that might lead to over-optimization issues.

Hmmm, not immediately. It's a SaaS site, not Ecommerce so it's not that massive. But I was wondering if it would hurt to have these as anchors for those pages. It's internal links. With external links, we'll add the keyword in the anchor.

 

[tiiberius]

Hmmm, not immediately. It's a SaaS site, not Ecommerce so it's not that massive. But I was wondering if it would hurt to have these as anchors for those pages. It's internal links. With external links, we'll add the keyword in the anchor.

It can hurt is large numbers it happened to be. And with external links be very careful.