Adding lots of translated pages

Anyone have experience with this?

[cabbie]

I have a friend who has a quality site and enjoys some nice spots for a variety of kws.
He has now just published translated pages of his main 500 pages into 3 languages making 1500 pages added overnight on a 20000 page site.Has anyone had any experience doing something similar and what effects did you see apart from the pr drain the added pages will cause?I fear google will throw it into the box despite it being in the best interests of the surfer.
What if he was to put the translated pages on another domain?Does anyone think thats workable?
Thankyou.

[cabbie]

basically I want to know...
Will the site be screwed?Would putting the translated pages on another domain work or does he start looking for some french, german and spanish links?

[tedster]

Adding 1500 pages to a 20,000 page site is not likely to cause a bump in the road, IMO. I would keep them on the same domain in dedicated language subdirectories. Make sure the server headers and charset metas and lang= attributes are all changed appropriately. Use judicious links (not every page to every page, but make it useful) and I think it will soar.

I have some experience with this just last year -- although not quite so many pages at once. Still, the proprtions of new to established urls were about the same. And the result was solid traffic from google.de to the German pages, etc.

[cabbie]

Thanks Tedster.

[Fridaynite]

I would never more put the other languages on the same domain. On two of my domains i have big problems, since i made this fault.
Another domain or other subdomains like fr.domain.tld or jp.domain.tld should work better.

[jomaxx]

There are valid arguments both ways, but one of my guiding philosophies is "If it ain't broke, don't mess with it". In other words, if you're happy with the site's current rankings, then major enhancements of this type belong on separate domains. The country-specific domains can help as well, although not everybody who speaks French lives in .fr and not everybody who speaks Spanish lives in .es

I'd also suggest doing the language-selection code in Javascript, so that Googlebot doesn't see a vast network of cross-links.

[cabbie]

>>"If it ain't broke, don't mess with it"<<
Hallelujah and praise the lord.my sentiments exactly.
Unfortunately some people and he is one of them, are driven to provide good content for their visitors and don't realise how fragile google serps can be.
Anyway, the idea is worthwhile as he has lots of foreign visitors.Just hope we execute it well.

[edited by: cabbie at 6:59 am (utc) on Aug. 24, 2006]

[tedster]

With 500 pages per language, subdomains does sound like a workable idea, too.

[Mr Bo Jangles]

I put multiple languages on same site with just directories (after advice on WW) and never suffered in google rankings - site has always ranked well, and this certainly didn't cause the slightest adverse reaction.