Backlink anchor text... is there a language barrier in Google?
member22
9:13 pm on Dec 14, 2011 (gmt 0)
Let's say I have a website in english about " green widgets " and that a website in japanese who also talks about " green widgets " links to me.
Can google go over the language barrier and understand that those 2 sites talk about the same topic even though they are 2 different languages ?
tedster
4:28 am on Dec 15, 2011 (gmt 0)
While Google Translate has challenges getting full sentences correct and idiomatic, I'd say that basic nouns and simple phrases are not a big hurdle for Google's translation - that's the part that they usually get right. So my assumption is that they can get it right. I have not tested this rigorously, however - it is just my assumption.
lucy24
6:27 am on Dec 15, 2011 (gmt 0)
basic nouns and simple phrases are not a big hurdle
Funny you should say that. Last time I took a closer look at logs, there was someone in Turkey (tr*) looking for information on-- according to Google Translate-- Japanese articles. (They were shown the back cover of an e-book originally printed in Japan. Can only hope it made them happy.)
Uhm. Definite articles? I hope not, because I kinda think Japanese doesn't have them. Newspaper articles? Things, stuff, items? Some specialized usage of the word "article" that only acquires meaning from its preceding adjective ("duty-free articles"), but Translate didn't know that?
* I am sorry to say that I had to go look it up, even though I've had Turkish visitors before-- and the presence of a dotless i in the query string should have been a dead giveaway. My text editor wanted to interpret it as UTF-16, making it into a Kanji character mysteriously parked in the middle of a Roman word.
deadsea
12:16 pm on Dec 15, 2011 (gmt 0)
I believe that getting back links from pages that are not in the language of your page are not helpful. Why would a Japanese website link to your English website? Their users wouldn't be able to follow the link and read your article. Cross-language links are a sign of link spam.
lucy24
10:56 pm on Dec 15, 2011 (gmt 0)
Their users wouldn't be able to follow the link and read your article.
You're in the US, aren't you? Believe it or not, there exist people who are able to read more than one language. And very often, it's their native language plus rudimentary English.
When I send people to my favorite smileys site, I link to the (default) German version. Depending on the mood of the hour, I may or may not mention that it comes in English too. If I follow a link to a Canadian site, I'll sometimes get dumped on the French-language version. Depending on what I'm looking for, it may or may not be necessary to change languages.
There is almost always a default or canonical (using the term loosely) language for a site. In general I'd link to that, rather than a secondary version. Depends of course on your audience-- but that's a different thread.
