Multilingual sites

SEO for Multilingual "mirror" sites

[MartinR]

I have a site in English and am starting one in German. The German site consists of an index page exactly the same as the English one, except translated. All links from this German index page link to the appropriate pages in the English website. Is there a possibility I will be penalised for this by the search engines?

[avmgeo]

Hi MartinR,

I have done something similar. I do not think I was penalised as I do not believe engines consider 2 pages with the same content in different languages as spam, mirror or doorway pages.

On the other hand you should not expect your translated page to rank well either, since just one page could be a rather limited content available in German.

If you want to submit your site to the ODP or other language-specific directories, it would be worth considering translating beyond the home page. Some directories will only take the time to list you if they believe there is enough content for the target language.