Jul 10
11
Website Translation – Does It Really Improve Search Engine Optimisation
For the last couple of years on a couple of high traffic websites I own I have had some website translation scripts installed. These scripts would push through a URL which was search engine friendly for each language and would cache translated pages accessed by users so not to abuse the translation service.
For a while I had my doubts as to how effective the script was. Although I could see in analytics that the URLs for some language were being accessed I was worried that maybe it was creating some sort of duplicate content issue. Even though the pages were translated. I decided to remove the scripts, mainly as an experiment to see what difference it would make. I was astonished to find that my page views and general traffic improved significantly over the next two weeks.
Now don’t get me wrong I am in favor for offering my users content in other languages, but from what I found I decided there is need for a different website translation solution.
I had a guy I know spend a bit time modifying the script to use Google translate. Whilst he was working on it the IP was banned for making too many requests. This is why a cache is essential if you are using website translation plug ins or scripts. So you serve the users pre translated copies of your pages rather than access the service every time a user clicks a flag!
In the end, I decided to leave the translation of the website all together. The traffic was increased anyway, so I was happy enough.
I then started to look at what other options are available. Looking at some high ranked websites particularly withn the same industry as mine it was clear that the ones perfoming better were not actually using automated language page translation. They were producing static translated version of their site on sub domains with the extension in the form of spanish.websiteURL.com or es.websiteURL.com etc.
So if you are thinking about adding translation to your website, think long and hard about it. Website translation plug ins and scripts can make the job a painless one, but in the long run they seem to do nothing but damage your traffic and search engine optimisation. Spending a little more time and money creating sub domain for maybe the top 5 to 10 languages or countries which access your site will pay you back over time.
I am going to take this path for my website translation very soon. I have decided to post up on some freelance site like ifreelance or vworker to find some cheap native language speakers and have them translate the templates for each site into a language, then host each one on a seperate sub domain. To me this seems the way forward.
Although if your site is new and is not gaining much traffic, it may be an option to try out some of the free plug ins, especially for wordpress to see if it helps make a difference. But if your site has large amounts of traffic and makes you good income, then maybe explore the above idea.