What is the current thinking about translated versions of pages? Is it necessary
-
My company is about to do a big push in China. We can get our homepage translated in Chinese at a very reasonable price. My questions are:
- Is it worth it? Do browsers to an adequately job of translating pages?
If it is worth it:
- Can someone suggest a good post explaining what to do with the translation?
- What are the SEO implications?
Thank you
Sarah -
There are a few ways to do it that have advantages and disadvantages. Your best best is probably to serve users based on their location, rather than their language -- since someone browsing in Chinese in another country probably has no use for the China based version of your site.
I know that can be done through Javascript, and I imagine there are other ways to do it. I'm not an expert on that, but there is a lot of information out there about it.
Oh, and here's Google's bare bones explanation of the dos and don'ts of Multilingual sites: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en#1. There's not a lot there but it's important to keep in mind.
-
Technically, how do I do this? Does our site look at the default language setting in the user's browser?
-
This is a big question and I'll do my best to answer it as much as I can.
First off, it's VERY important. Mandarin to English Translation within browsers is terrible (I say this having lived in Beijing and worked as an English Language web marketer there). Make sure your cheap translation is done by someone who is Bilingual and proficient in translating English to Simple Chinese, otherwise you can end up with a translation that doesn't make grammatical sense (the differences in grammar and characters make accurate translation difficult).
SEO is different in different languages, you have to consider what users will be searching for. Also keep in mind that many people will be searching with Baidu or even Bing rather than Google (which is semi-blocked in China), and you will have to adjust your SEO tactics accordingly. Baidu almost exclusively indexes and serves pages in Simple Chinese, (the language of their users) so a good translation is crucial. Also -- you're going to have to do some link building from Chinese Language sites, your English Language link profile will not do you much good.
It's takes a long time, but if you can get a regional address (ie .cn) that is a big trust signal. Local hosting also helps.
Finally, it's important to realize that China is a decently developed space with a lot of national pride. You're not going to have a great user experience if your pages are poorly translated, especially if there is a local alternative. If you want to do business in China, make the investment in an excellent translation.
Hope that helps.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Will hreflang with a language and region allow Google to show the page to all users of that language regardless of region?
I'm launching translations on a website with the first translation being Brazilian Portuguese. If I use the following hreflang: If a user is outside of Brazil and has their browser language set to just Portuguese (Not Portuguese (Brazil)) will Google still serve them the Portuguese version of my pages in search results?
International SEO | | Brando160 -
Hreflang tag on every page?
Hello Moz Community, I'm working with a client who has translated their top 50 landing pages into Spanish. It's a large website and we don't have the resources to properly translate all pages at once, so we started with the top 50. We've already translated the content, title tags, URLs, etc. and the content will live in it's own /es-us/ directory. The client's website is set up in a way that all content follows a URL structure such as: https://www.example.com/en-us/. For Page A, it will live in English at: https://www.example.com/en-us/page-a For Page A, it will live in Spanish at https://www.example.com/es-us/page-a ("page-a" may vary since that part of the URL is translated) From my research in the Moz forums and Webmaster Support Console, I've written the following hreflang tags: /> For Page B, it will follow the same structure as Page A, and I wrote the corresponding hreflang tags the same way. My question is, do both of these tags need to be on both the Spanish and English version of the page? Or, would I put the "en-us" hreflang tag on the Spanish page and the "es-us" hreflang tag on the English page? I'm thinking that both hreflang tags should be on both the Spanish and English pages, but would love some clarification/confirmation from someone that has implemented this successfully before.
International SEO | | DigitalThirdCoast0 -
Sajan Translation Services
Has anyone tried out Sajan Translation Services? What was your experience? Do you have any other translation service companies to recommend? Thanks!
International SEO | | Mike.Bean0 -
Pages with Duplicate Page Title
Blog - FDM Group has duplicate page title for all blog posts. We also have multiple localized versions of pages, so the titles are seen as duplicate. Possible resolutions? Thanks in advance.
International SEO | | fdmgroup0 -
Should I be deindexing pages with thin or weak content?
If I have pages that rank product categories by alphabetical order should I deindex those pages? Keeping in mind the pages do not have any content apart from product titles? For example: www.url.com/albums/a/ www.url.com/albums/b/ If I deindexed these pages would I lose any authority passed through internal linking?
International SEO | | Jonathan_Hatton0 -
How fast is my front page?
Yesterday, I changed all of my front page structure from tables to divs. I think this has improved page load time, but I am in Australia, so it is hard to tell. Using Firefox with Firebug tells me the load time here is between 4 to 6 seconds. One of my editors is in Houston, and she says 2 seconds. I'm hoping you can help me, it will take less than a minute. Can you load the front page and tell me how long it takes - and where you are - Country/State Also, if you click to a story, how long does that take? http://newsblaze.com I am working on the story page template too, but it will take longer to get right, because it also is the same for 3 other areas, so I have to be more careful. It would also be nice to get a before and after snapshot from various places. The reason I care about shaving off a second or two is that I've been told google may now care about loading speed, and they are rejecting my new adsense account because of poor user experience on my site, and I have no idea what they mean by that, so I'm clutching at straws.
International SEO | | loopyal0 -
Interlinking 60 ccTLD country versions of website
We will be launching 60 new ccTLD country versions of an established core website.
International SEO | | lcourse
Quality, human translated content in 35 languages.
We have a CSS dropdown menu with the 60 country flags and country/language name as anchor text. Formatted as deeplinks to the corresponding pages in the 60 country versions, that we planned to add on each page. How would you recommend to implement the interlinking between these 60 ccTLD? My concerns are: won't we dillute the link value of our links in the main page content too much with links to 60ccTLD on each page? may we trigger a google penalty as the new ccTLD have no other links yet and each page will have the same anchor text and links from exactly the same 60 domains. would you place the country dropdown rather at the bottom of the page (e.g. footer) to avoid that google will not crawl all links in main content page. Any thoughts or suggestions are appreciated1 -
International Landing Page Strategy
Hello, I'm looking for some insight in an area that I don't have much experience in - hoping the community can help! We are a healthcare staffing company serving clients in the U.S. (www.bartonassociates.com). We are interested in attracting clients in Australia and New Zealand. I'm wondering if anyone as experience with best practices for doing so (both from an SEO and PPC perspective). Would it be best to purchase .au and .nz domains for these landing pages and link back to our US site for more information (or even recreate a modified version of our US site for .au and .nz). My concern here is duplicate content issues, among other things. Or, would it be better to create Australia and New Zealand focused landing pages on our US site and drive PPC there? My concern here is that we would never get organic traffic from Australia and New Zealand to our US site, in light of the competition. Also, the messaging would be a bit mixed if targeting all three countries. Our core term is "locums" and "locum tenens". Greatly appreciate any insight from you guys. Thanks, Jason
International SEO | | ba_seomoz0