Spanish version of my website not indexed

[schirino]

I have a multilingual website in English, French, Italian and Spanish. The main website content is English, which ranks pretty good in Google, same in French and Italian but for some reason it is not ranking at all in Google.es in Spanish…What could be going on? It has no duplicate content as most the content is a Spanish version of the English version (but not an exact translation)…Any reason you can think of so I can investigate…
Many thanks in advance

[mercedesP]

How old is the site (spanish translation)?
Has the spanish version got spanish backlinks?

[schirino]

Hi Mercedes, it's relatively new (no more than 2 months). However the other language versions rank in Google. I wonder why the Spanish version doesn't. As for the back links, yes I've been working on this though I must say it doesn't have many.

[mercedesP]

I think is too early to think that there's any kind of problem content/backlink-related, but in anycase have the pages been crawled?

I don't think our index is updated as fast/frequent as in other countries.

May I ask if the translation was done by a human translator (with SEO knowledge)? (as I've seen too many sites that should read something on the lines of "Cervantes in Don Quijote" or they are just a pile of gobbledegook)

[StoutFiles]

All these pages are in your sitemap?

[gn_wendy]

two questions:

1) is all your content on the same domain i.e. .com or .org? or do you have country (language) specific domains like .es and .fr?

it makes a HUGE difference

2) how have you distinguished between differnet languages? using mysite.com/en/ mysite.com/es/ - using subdomains en.mysite.com es.mysite.com

I had a site that used /en/ and /es/. We switched it to subdomains á la wikipedia and ended up doing much better.

The only other thing that I could say is you might have very few 'local' links to your spanish pages.

[schirino]

Thank you very much all for your answers. Very useful indeed. My site has the following domains e.g. mysite.co.uk/es/ for the Spanish version mysite.co.uk/it/ Italian version mysite.co.uk/fr/ French. The first version in English was mysite.co.uk with a page Rank of 5. I included links from the English version to the other language versions one month ago but we still haven’t got any Page Rank for these versions.
The English, Italian and French version have a good rank in Google, though the Spanish version still doesn’t come up in the search engines results in Google, which is really worrying…I’m working in submissions in web directories.
I guess I will have to wait and see...