Multilingual Web Sites

My experience with a multilingual web site

[ccDan]

There are a couple recent postings here regarding multilingual web sites, and I thought I'd share my experience. Rather than hijack one of those threads, where my comments aren't completely on-topic, I figured I'd start a new thread.

My site is small, and it probably takes me a weeks to get the same number of visits some of you get in a day. So, I don't have the numbers to really make any statistically valid data, so take my musings with that in mind. It is what it is...

My site is what I would consider truly bilingual. What you see in English is what you'll see in another language. They look identical, except for language. Content is identical across both.

My experience is that the non-English language articles are read with at least as much frequency as the English language articles. Some are read fewer, but most are read as much as or more than the English language articles. Sometimes as much as three or more times as frequently!

My thinking is that there aren't as many non-English sites as there are English sites, especially within a specific niche. So, non-English readers are more likely to find your site than English readers are to find your site.

The interesting thing is advertising on the site.

On the English language side, click-thru percentages remain fairly consistent over time. The click-thru percentage on an older article remains about the same as it was when it was new.

On the non-English side, click-thru percentages drop over time. Fresh content is more likely to generate ad clicks than older content.

As for search engines, my non-English language keywords generally get higher rankings than my English language keywords.

That's my experience, statistically limited though it may be. Perhaps others with multilingual sites would be willing to share their thoughts?

[engine]

Thanks for that. It's interesting that one multilingual site we're running has achieved a much better performance from the main search engines since expanding beyond English. Although, the traffic from the country-specific index is still weak. Must be the fact that we're running on a .com and hosted in North America.

[larryhatch]

I had a similar experience, foreign language pages outperforming the ones in english.
My site presents a lot of special maps. I finally put one up for Central America.
A good friend in Spain, well educated, translated the text portion for me.
Within weeks, it became one of the top 2 or 3 map pages, outperforming North America, Europe etc.
With much or most of the web in English, there remain some good niche situations. -Larry

[imweb]

Although, the traffic from the country-specific index is still weak. Must be the fact that we're running on a .com and hosted in North America.

I have similar experience. I use subdomain for non-english site. Interistingly only MSN indexes both language sites completely. G & Y only index english version.

[Leosghost]

engine ..yes if your traffic is from g primarily that will be the major factor ..

imweb ..all my sites and those of clients are in at least 2 languages ..my results are that sites are spidered and indexed equally comprehensively in both /all languages ..by the big 3 se's ..however depending on where the individual pages are hosted the traffic varied ( anticipated the latest G geotargeted responses so wasnt hit by that aspect of jagger ) from 10 to 90% depending on incoming IP of the searcher and the presentation of what google considers relevant to their request based upon where they are ..irrespective of wether they have specified all the world or language or country only in the search box ..

click though is more prone to rapid fall off due to none english adwords advertisers monitoring their ROI less frequently ..less churn on page less spotting of bad ads ..

simplification but you get the general idea?