Google’s Unexpected Take On Site Folder Structure And SEO

Google’s John Mueller answered a question about website category structure in URLs. The context was about a website that offered the same content in multiple languages and the person asking the question wanted to know what was the best way to structure the category URLs.

The main site is in English, representing their primary market.

Their current category structure resembles:

• example.com/blog
• example.com/en-us/blog

and the internationlized versions have category structures like this: site.com/fr-fr/blog

A person asked the following question on Reddit:

“Do we need localized folders with duplicate content for our home market on our site?
Hi all,

I’m familiar with hreflang tags and setting up alternate folders and references for different countries and languages, but I have a specific question for our home market. My client has a large site serving many international clients with localized content, but they’re a US-based company and that’s where the majority of their user…