Adding Spanish page for google.es - will it beat the English page? - Google Search and SEO forum at WebmasterWorld

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Adding Spanish page for google.es - will it beat the English page?

Ev_olution

11:11 pm on Mar 19, 2008 (gmt 0)

My main page ranks #2 on Google for the Spanish version of Google (for my niche), but it is in English. If I write a new content page (original) that is in Spanish, do you think it will rank up with the English page or even beat it?

Can Google tell if a page is in Spanish and favor it over English...do they think it should?

Just wondering if anybody has any experience with this?

Thanks,
Ev

tedster

2:36 am on Mar 20, 2008 (gmt 0)

Can Google tell if a page is in Spanish...

Yes.

...and favor it over English...do they think it should?

It would depend on the language of the search terms, right?

eltercerhombre

3:14 am on Mar 20, 2008 (gmt 0)

What I will do: write the same content in Spanish and link it from the English one to see what happens.

[edited by: tedster at 4:12 am (utc) on Mar. 20, 2008]

Ev_olution

5:43 pm on Mar 20, 2008 (gmt 0)

Thanks for the thoughts, that helps.

Anybody else?

rainborick

7:52 pm on Mar 20, 2008 (gmt 0)

Keep in mind that language and geo-location are two separate issues as far as the search engines are concerned. There are several clues that Google can use to determine the language used on a page, and they do track that attribute so they can allow users to limit their searches by language as well as by country. If you want to add pages written in Spanish on a site that is primarily written in Engligh, you should use the 'lang' attribute in the <html> tag, as in:

<html lang="es">.

Other ways to note a document's language are available in the server response header or a <meta> tag like:

Ev_olution

10:06 pm on Mar 20, 2008 (gmt 0)

Thanks for the meta tag info. That is really helpful. I do want the pages to comply with Google's requirements.

I get frequent requests for our products to be offered in Spanish and I want to be effective in finding those interested in the SE's.

It will only be a handful of spanish pages on a site with over 150 pages in English. Is that an issue for ranking?

rainborick

11:55 pm on Mar 20, 2008 (gmt 0)

There's no ranking problems with adding pages in a different language. Actually, I think its safe to say that it can only help you gain traffic and retain users.

OnlyToday

1:45 am on Mar 21, 2008 (gmt 0)

A few years ago I added several Spanish language pages that are just translations of the existing English language pages. I never added the language meta tag, maybe I'll do that now, thanks. They do as well in Google as the English pages, from google.com .mx .co .pe .es etc...

Ad revenue however is much less (30%) in Spanish but enough to justify the bandwidth.

Ev_olution

5:06 pm on Mar 23, 2008 (gmt 0)

That is good to know about the different Google engines picking up the same Spanish page.

Is there a way to determine traffic demand for a Spanish search term in Google.es? I tried using SBI! brainstormer, but it didn't return any results for the Spanish term.