Holiday-Rentals' French version link flags have been zapped

OTA = Online Travel Agency, which means those sites that sell the booking and take the payment for you.
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Mountain Goat
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Holiday-Rentals' French version link flags have been zapped

Post by Mountain Goat »

I was surprised to find that in the recent HR revamp, the French flag link, to the French text version of our HR page has disappeared.

Assuming it had just been missed out I had a talk with Dorothée, their charming (and helpful) French version editrice, who explained that HR had decided to ditch the French flag link on property listing pages, but it was still available if you entered their internal search engine and drilled down to the level above one's page (i.e. showing choice of several properties in your geographic area).

I'm completely baffled by this.

Punters can reach our HR English text page via numerous routes including HR Home Page, HR Search Engine etc., but also (and I'm the ultimate bore on the subject) via an external search engine. If they take the latter route, and get to our English page, there's no way they're going to know there's a French version.

We've had a recent booking from a bilingual French enquirer - she wanted to send our property information to her family. I had to tell her the French edition exists. That's nuts.

I admit, in general you could argue that French punters would search using French keywords, and end up on the French version, but many of the keywords are the same in both languages, and we need to take advantage of the head-start that HR UK has over HR FR with SEO.

It also creates a reassuring impression to show enquirers that we are francophone, especially if they've arrived first on our English page.

What possible advantage can it be to remove the flag? I may be wrong, but I would have thought the hundreds of extra links would benefit SEO.

All the above can apply vice-versa to someone who arrives on the French site first.

If you want to squawk, then the guy to contact at HR is:

samuel at holiday-rentals.com

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Mountain Goat
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Post by Mountain Goat »

I had a very thorough reply to my whinge about the missing French flag link, from Samuel @ HR.

Apparently I was the only one to mention it. In a nutshell:

1) There are layout problems with language flags, and this ties in with the multiple planned additional language sites.

2) There are SEO issues with linking to equivalent text in another language. I don't understand this, but they take some care with SEO and I have to take their gurus' word on it.

3) To some site visitors the French flag on one's page implied French-speaking owners, and this could discourage customers imagining subsequent communication problems.

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