Geeklog Forums

Currently I use English only site_name and site_slogan even in multilingual sites. But I've recently had a client that tried to find in a search engine the site I made for them. This site's default language is not English.

Alas, they told me it's nowhere to be found. I replied in surprise that it's right there on the top. Well, guess what? I learned they instinctively ignore any search result in which the title is not in the language they used in their search phrase.

This is even though the search engine displays relevant lines (in the wanted language) from the site just underneath the title!

Now, before you dismiss them, I came to realize such behaviors usually are not the exception but the rule.

So obviously this must be solved.

Solution 1 - Multilingual site_name and/or site_slogan:
Apply the multilingual patch for site_name and/or site_slogan.

How? Define site_name_en, site_slogan_en, etc. and make lib-common.php choose which ones are needed.

Why not? Because I have a feeling it would confuse search engines. Besides, while search results from _en articles would be in English, who can tell which language will be displayed in results from the main page, staticpages that use themselves the internal detection for language, etc.

Also, it's possible search engines don't support the multilingual patch (see here).

Solution 2 - Multiple languages (read: Default language + English):

How? Use both the default language + English in site_name and/or site_slogan. Write "/" between them, for exampe:

Why not? Because it may create some loooong titles. Yet I still think it's the better solution.

So what are you waiting for? Well, if you use a long title for the site's name, it wouldn't leave much room for a slogan. Well, technically it would leave a room, but you know what I mean.

I searched through the files to see how important is a slogan anyway. It turns out that by default only the header (main page only) and RSS feeds use it.

So I thought of just getting rid of site_slogan, but unfortunately Geeklog uses it even if it's empty (well, you'd get a "(title) - (space)" ).

Another idea I came up with is to use the shortest phrase possible. For example (because it's on the main page only), the word "homepage":

Still, it wouldn't make sense in the RSS feeds and in addition how annoying would it be to see this search result:

?

This of course assumes the same searcher, who avoids sites with titles in a different language, wouldn't mind sites with titles in multiple languages as long as they include theirs.