Spanish Page on a Predominately English Site

[jk3210]

How will Google treat a page of Spanish text that's located on a predominately English (.)com site?

Will Google simply rank it with all other Spanish pages?

Say, for example, if a Home page is translated into Spanish.

[mayor]

Would love to have an answer to your post jk3210.

Anyone have an answer?

How about a page with the English and Spanish versions both on the same page?

[vitaplease]

Google is quite good at autodetecting the language on a page, even if it is Spanish on a predominantly English .com site. (at least it is in my case)
So the pages will turn up on a "páginas en español" search.

There was a recent thread on troubles with German/Dutch/Scandinavian autodetection though..

[gethan]

I'm finding the same - the few spanish, french and dutch pages that are on an english site I run, appear in the appropiate serps. Even Adsense spots the difference and puts in Spanish ads.

[Herenvardo]

All SE's will know that the page is Spanish if you put a lang atribute in your body.
[w3.org...]

Hoping be useful,
Herenvardö

[Larryhat]

I have one page entirely in (good) Spanish, on an otherwise 100% English language site. Its just a translation of an english page, but refers to Central America so I had somebody do the translation properly.

The topic is popular, some hispanic sites picked up on that one page and linked, and Google found it that way. I never 'submitted' the page. Its doing fine considering. - LH

[jk3210]

Thanks for all the excellent responses.

Let me refine the question somewhat...

If Google finds a Spanish page on a predominately English site, will that Spanish page have an equal opportunity to rank well for searches initiated through [G]oogle.es as well as [G]oogle.com?

IOW, does Google see a difference between someone searching for a Spanish phrase using [G]oogle.com (probably someone residing in the US), and someone searching for the same Spanish phrase using [G]oogle.es (probably someone residing in Spain)?

(If anyone is smart enough answer the above question, I also have a few questions about the origins of the Universe...)

[Leosghost]

42

[erwig]

The serps for a Spanish query will be exactly the same whether you search on Google.com or Google.es. (I do a lot of German searches on Google.ca.) Google.es does not give any advantage to Spanish pages or pages from Spain.

The only difference is that on Google.es, there will be a selection box right under the search box that allows you to restrict the search to "Pages in Spanish" or "Pages from Spain". You can get the same result in Google.com, but you have to go to the advanced search. People using Google.es are therefore more likely to restrict the search to Spanish only because the option is so prominent.

On the other hand, if the search term is clearly a Spanish word, non-Spanish pages are unlikely to rank highly anyway. But if you search for "Microsoft Word", the rankings will be very different, depending on the language selection.

Google is generally quite good in classifying languages, especially if there's a lot of text on the page. To see if Google recognizes your page correctly as Spanish, simply do a search for your URL in Google advanced search, setting the language to Spanish only.

Christian

[PatrickDeese]

> How about a page with the English and Spanish versions both on the same page?

I wouldn't mix multiple languages on the same page (except for something like "click here for french" in french, or whatever).

[patoruzu]

>>>Google.es does not give any advantage to Spanish pages or pages from Spain<<<

I’m in Argentina. When you search from Argentina in Google.com.ar or Google.es “firstname lastname” of a very important american author whose book we comment in our site, the first result in the SERPs is the book site (in English, of course).

The second result is the page of our site (in Spanish). The rest of the first ten positions in the SERPs are in English.

I ‘ve tried the same search using an US anonymizer site, and our page is not among the top ten results, as I would expect.

Important: our site is entirely in Spanish and it is hosted in Argentina.

[jk3210]

patoruzu, in your opinion would you say that most people in Latin American countries do their searches using:

1.) Google.com
2.) Google.com with Spanish language selected in prefs
3.) Google.es
4.) Google.com/es with "páginas en español" selected
5.) Google.com.+their country code (example: google.com.ar)

Thanks

[patoruzu]

Our site has visits from all over Latin America and Spain.

Referrals are almost all Google.com.ar, Google.com.mx, Google.es and lots more: Colombia, Chile, Perú, Ecuador, etc.

Yahoo.com.ar, Yahoo.com.mx and Yahoo.es are important, too.

Google.com searchers are almost all from the US.

[vitaplease]

The serps for a Spanish query will be exactly the same whether you search on Google.com or Google.es

Not so sure about that, many have seen many differences over the last year.
Who knows, maybe even the location of backlinks can play a role as well.

[PatrickDeese]

... in your opinion would you say that most people in Latin American countries do their searches using:
1.) Google.com
2.) Google.com with Spanish language selected in prefs
3.) Google.es
4.) Google.com/es with "páginas en español" selected
5.) Google.com.+their country code (example: google.com.ar)

I have a handful of Spanish language content sites that receive approximately 1 million uniques per month.

These sites receive their traffic predominantly from:

Google.[tld] (com.mx, .es, com.ar, com.pe, com.co, .cl, co.ve, .co.cr, .com.pr, .hn, .com.uy) - not much Spanish traffic from Google.com with Spanish search - 90% comes from the country tlds.

The family of Spanish Y! sites: mx.yahoo.com, ar.yahoo.com, espanol.yahoo.com, es.yahoo.com

The Spanish MSN sites: t1msn.com.mx, msn.es, yupimsn.com, latam.msn.com

Also worth mentioning are the Terra properties, and Aol's Spanish branches: Aol.com.mx, Aol.com.ar, Aol.com.pr.

I get a little traffic from Altavista's Spanish tlds as well, about what AJ gives most people in English.