Content for Multilingual sites

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Content for Multilingual sites

sett

11:09 am on Aug 13, 2012 (gmt 0)

Hi All,

I need the assistance to deal with content strategy for my multilingual websites.

I have a website www.mysite.com (In USA English) and it is doing well on global search engines.

Now, I want to promote my business on non English search engines like France, Germany and Spain.

I want to build ccTLDs for the countries mentioned above. For e.g.

www.mysite.de
www.mysite.fr
www.mysite.es

I am planning to add content in local language on these sites for e.g. on French website all content, navigation links, URLs etc will be available in French language. Similarly for Spanish and German websites.

I want to know that can I use the translated content of my English website on my ccTLDs. Will It create or cause any content duplicity issue for me in this case?

Thanks in advance for any assistance.

tedster

12:43 pm on Aug 13, 2012 (gmt 0)

Translated content is not ever duplicate content - there's no character match happening at all.

Where people sometimes run into trouble is localized content in the same language - such as English content localized for the UK, South Africa, Australia, etc.

deadsea

6:56 pm on Aug 13, 2012 (gmt 0)

Translated content works great. I've worked with two large sites that have started in English and published their entire website translated for other parts of the world to use.

As Tedster says, if you launch www.mysite.co.uk and www.mysite.au (both in English), that is a time that there could be duplicate content. But even then, you just have to add both to webmaster tools and set their geo targeting correctly.

One site I worked with had product reviews. They were all initially in English. When the launched sites in other languages they initially showed some of that English content on those sites. Based on that experience, I would not recommend doing that from an SEO standpoint. I would show just star ratings from the reviews and make users click over to the English site to read the English text of the review.

Another site I worked with machine translated everything through Google Translations initially, then put up tools that allow their users to fix the translations. If you have a tight budget, that works way better than I would have predicted. After a couple years, that site now has 10 languages that are very well translated, another 15 that users have helped out with to some extent, and another 15 with fairly horrible machine translations still.

If you are using countrly TLDs, then Googlebot should be able to detect the language very well and target your sites appropriately. Even so, it is good idea use the lang attribute on your html tag: <html lang="en" dir="ltr"> or <html lang="ar" dir="rtl">

sett

4:37 am on Aug 14, 2012 (gmt 0)

Guys, thx for your views.

I will not use Google translation tool to translate the content. I will take help of professional translators for this work.

One more thing, I am also planning to localize the interface of website's software. I think it would help me a lot to provide the information such as installation process, user interface and help guide about my different software in more user friendly manner.

What do you suggest?

phranque

5:04 am on Aug 14, 2012 (gmt 0)

if you are using ccTLDs you should be OK for the most part, with that content getting filtered for that country index.
in some cases you may not qualify for a ccTLD in which case you may want to use a subdomain or subdirectory of a gTLD and use geotargeting in GWT.
you'll probably want to keep your .com configured for ROW - i.e. not specifically geotargeted for the US.
also there are a few exceptions of ccTLDs which google treats as gTLDs.

Geotargetable domains - Webmaster Tools Help:
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1347922 [support.google.com]

you'll want to make sure you didn't miss anything in these references...

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Working with multi-regional websites:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/03/working-with-multi-regional-websites.html [googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com]

Multi-regional and multilingual sites - Webmaster Tools Help:
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=182192 [support.google.com]

rel="alternate" hreflang="x" - Webmaster Tools Help:
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077 [support.google.com]

sett

6:03 am on Aug 14, 2012 (gmt 0)

Thanks phranque for sharing the informative URLs.

I will build the ccTLDs for only Germany, France and Spain countries so i think there will be no problem for me to go with the specific ccTLDs means there will be no need create the subdomain of sub directory for these countries.

Also, please tell me the use of hreflang is must in the HTML code in specific ccTLDs? As per my understanding after reading the articles shared by you this code/tag works well if you are having the the sub domains or sub directories URLs for different countries.

Please correct me if I am wrong.

phranque

9:03 am on Aug 14, 2012 (gmt 0)

please tell me the use of hreflang is must in the HTML code in specific ccTLDs?

it's not a strict requirement but it provides relationship information among a set of related urls.
it doesn't matter what your url structure is according to this spec.
link rel alternate hreflang is not about the url you're on - it's about the related urls.

Some example scenarios where rel="alternate" hreflang="x" is recommended:
...
- Your site content is fully translated. For example, you have both German and English versions of each page.

and...

If you have multiple language versions of a URL, each language page in the set must use rel="alternate" hreflang="x" to identify the other language versions. For example, if your site provides content in French, English, and Spanish, the Spanish version must include a rel="alternate" hreflang="x" link to both the English and the French versions, and the English and French versions must each include a similar link pointing to each other and to the Spanish site.

so for example on your Spain home page you would add the following in the document head:


<link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr" href="http://www.example.fr/">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="de" href="http://www.example.de/">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="http://www.example.com/">

and if you had a UK-specific English site for example you would also add:


<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-GB" href="http://www.example.co.uk/">

and for French & English Canadian sites you might add something like:


<link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-CA" href="http://fr.example.ca/">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-CA" href="http://en.example.ca/">

sett

12:37 pm on Aug 14, 2012 (gmt 0)

Thanks phranque for your suggestions.

Could you please give any advise about my below query

One more thing, I am also planning to localize the interface of website's software. I think it would help me a lot to provide the information such as installation process, user interface and help guide about my different software in more user friendly manner.

What do you suggest?