International Search Engine Optimization

Updates Announcements
#1

[Update] April 3, 2024

Hi Creators,

On March 11, we will update roblox.com to allow search engines to index localized experiences and catalog pages in all languages supported on our platform. This will greatly increase the visibility of your creations through off-platform search results to users with non-English browser language preferences.

How does this work?

We will add locales in front of URLs on www.roblox.com depending on your current language settings.

As an example, today we have the following URL:

  • https://www.roblox.com/games/1818/Classic-Crossroads

In the future, you will be able to access the same content on alternate URLs such as:

  • https://www.roblox.com/es/games/1818/Classic-Crossroads
  • https://www.roblox.com/ja/games/1818/Classic-Crossroads
  • https://www.roblox.com/es-mx/games/1818/Classic-Crossroads

(How) will I be affected as a Creator?

This change will largely be seamless for most creators. Over time, you can expect your creations to appear more prominently in search result rankings for non-English languages. To take advantage of this, make sure you enable automatic translation for your experiences (refer to this post for details). Turning on automatic translation will also allow users worldwide to better discover your experiences (through recommendations and search) on Roblox.

Any existing links or bookmarks to www.roblox.com web pages will continue to work seamlessly.

If you are a browser plugin creator or build custom tools that rely on identifying specific URLs on roblox.com, you may need to update your tools to accommodate the new URL patterns. See more details below.

Technical Details

We are providing these technical details for the small number of plugin creators or tool developers who may be impacted, to ensure you can adapt to the new URL patterns.

  • We will continue to support accessing www.roblox.com without a locale in the URL.
  • If necessary, we may sometimes redirect users making GET requests.
  • This change will only impact www.roblox.com. It will not impact apis.roblox.com, or any other subdomains.

Browser Plugins

If you have a Chrome extension or Firefox browser plugin that relies on matching specific URLs for content scripts or other behavior, you may need to modify your rules to handle the new URLs.

Before

  • “matches”: [ “https://www.roblox.com/my/avatar” ]

After

  • “matches”: [ “https://www.roblox.com/my/avatar”, “https://www.roblox.com/*/my/avatar” ]

Identifying Locales in URLs

Locale path prefixes are short strings (between 2-6 characters) that represent a language or language + country combination. A few examples:

  • es-es = Spanish (Spain)

  • es-mx = Spanish (Mexico)

  • ja = Japanese (Japan)

We plan to support two patterns:

  • Standalone ISO 639-1 language codes (2 alphabetic characters)

    • Examples: en, ja, de

  • Two letter ISO 639-1 + ISO 3166 country codes (2-3 characters alphanumeric) separated by a hyphen

    • Examples: en-us, es-mx, ar-001, ja-jp, de-de

If you want to check whether a specific URL contains a locale programmatically, here are some options you can consider:

  1. In Javascript-based tools, you can use the Intl.getCanonicalLocales API for modern browsers to determine if a string is a valid locale.

  2. Many programming languages offer standard libraries for identifying locales

  3. Another option would be to use a regular expression that detects both patterns listed above. Keep in mind that some paths might trigger false positives, e.g. roblox.com/js/… is a regular folder and not a locale.

We welcome any feedback and comments you may have. Please kindly drop us a note below.

Thank you.

140 Likes
#2

This topic was automatically opened after 9 minutes.

#3

Cool update, does it work for RTL languages as well and if not is there plans for the future

7 Likes
#4

Roblox doesn’t fully support Right to Left languages as far as I know, as Roblox doesn’t support Arabic and Hebrew, no words gets automatically translated

3 Likes
#5

would be cool to have this expanded, middle eastern and those speak RTL language players would love to see more local games that are in their language.

5 Likes
#6

:skull:

6 Likes
#7

I am referring to the fact that words don’t get translated to an right to left language, I am not saying that right to left languages aren’t supported, I am referring to the fact that they aren’t translated

2 Likes
#8

There’s a flaw: you can’t specify a context for each translation, which means that some translations might be wrong because assuming an wrong context.

This happens often on words whose meanings are completely different.

I’d like if people were able to specify translations or just let them translate the game manually.
Also, automatic translation should be toggleable for each game.

These are my suggestions. :smiley:

2 Likes
#9

This is amazing. Roblox is opening doors to all developers across the world. Hopefully, more languages and countries are added to this. :clap:

#10

Will we get en-us and en-uk support? :crying_cat_face:

6 Likes
#11

And… that’s why localization tables exist

#12

you’ll add :chad:? :poland: :denmark: :cote_divoire:? idk just random flags as far as :brazil:. wait, will you add support for :argentina: :uruguay:?

2 Likes
#13

Cool update! Thanks for keeping us in the loop - will be pushing an update to RoPro to account for this change.

#14

I can’t promise anything, but we would love to support that someday. :slightly_smiling_face:

4 Likes
#15

Yes, but they don’t automatically get added, There are a ton of Arabic players, and some Arabic games have thousands of players, and roblox only put a little effort to adding support for Arabic, Why would roblox not add support for Arabic if it has more speakers than Russian?

and my game uses a ton of 3D Text, so it will be very complicated to add the translation, also the fact that Arabic letters are connected will make it too complicate to do so since Blender’s Text object doesn’t natively support Arabic

#16

If Roblox ever were to improve localization, please separate region, language, date, and time formatting, and so on. So that I can use the following configuration:

Region: US
Language: US English
Date format: dd/mm/yyyy
Time format: 24 hour
Week starts on: Monday

I deal with too many services that simply do not respect my preferences, and force them based on the region, or language that I have chosen.

5 Likes
#17

Roblox doesn’t really care about the Arab community

1 Like
#18

Hoping that a proper tag search system and search filter system will come, but I’m glad that improvements are being made in that direction.

On another note, I doubt anyone will really need this but this came to mind when seeing country codes again, here’s something that can convert country codes to full length names (although only in English):

1 Like
#19

Awesome Update as always :slight_smile: this will be a big help for alot of games

#20

Wouldn’t a ?l=en or something like that have worked as well?