Hello Prestashop-Community,
we have moved to Prestashop from another ecommerce software and it has taken months to get everything working. It has been a bumpy ride but we are finally live.
I can not add our domains into Google Webmaster Tools or Google Analytics because we use multiple languages on our store. This means our root www.domain.com is never accessible, instead the users are always directly transfered to www.mydomain.com/fr/ (linked from www.mydomain.fr) or www.mydomain.com/es/ (linked from www.mydomain.es). Google just will NOT verify our domain because it seems to expect to have a verification code on the domain root, which simply is not accessible in Prestashop when we have several languages active.
Is moving to Multistore in Prestashop the solution?
As I understand it, I can set a base domain to a specific language only with multistore activated.
I am guessing this also has SEO advantages since each domain gets its "own" site?
We are very cautious because we are now finally live and we can't afford to mess anything up, we are already suffering badly from missed links from our old site (since we can not verify on Webmaster Tools yet, and we have not been able to 301 redirect all our old domain links).
I have read the documentation on multistore and googled it but I am still scared about activating it. Could it somehow mess up our current modified theme? In the header of our current site we have a language picker (fr, es, etc) which brings to customer to the subfolders mentioned above (/fr/ & /es/). What will happen to this if I activate multistore? Is this purely a theme thing? How is language/currency change handled in multistore?
So, activating multistore is the only/best solution for a multi-language shop, I guess?
Can I activate multistore, and if something goes wrong with our theme, just deactivate it and get back to where I was?
Is this the only way for us to be able to verify our store on Google Webmaster Tools and Analytics?
If the general advice is not to use multistore, can anyone help or link to a guide on how to verify a page with forced www.mydomain.com/language/ on Google Webmaster Tools...?
Sorry for the long post and all these beginner questions. Thanks in advance for your input, I am sure there are those of you with first hand experience in this.
We are using Prestashop 1.6.0.9.
Cheers.