how google panda handles multilingual sites

[farouk111]

Hi everybody
i have a multilingual website and one domain name
the site has english arabic and spanish sections

can low quality pages on one section affect the traffic on another section?

In other words, can low quality pages on the spanish website affect the traffic of the english site, provided that all sites fall under one domain

www.mydomain.com english
www.mydomain.com/arabic arabic
www.mydomain.com/spanish the spanish site


many thanks
.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 6:51 am (utc) on Nov 1, 2012]
[edit reason] fixed typo at poster request [/edit]

[tedster]

That's one heck of a good question. My guess would be that Panda did not cross-relate languages, because this would have added a new complexity tp an already very complex algorithmic challenge.

My sense of Google organic is that site sections in various languages (when correctly identified) are rated in a degree of isolation.

[phranque]

just a hint maybe - because of the wording in this webmaster central blog post, i would think that panda seems more likely to treat languages independently, versus how they described penguin's rollout in a later blog post:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/04/high-quality-sites-algorithm-goes.html [googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com]:

Today we’ve rolled out this improvement globally to all English-language Google users, ...

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/04/another-step-to-reward-high-quality.html [googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com]

The change will go live for all languages at the same time. For context, the initial Panda change affected about 12% of queries to a significant degree; this algorithm affects about 3.1% of queries in English to a degree that a regular user might notice. The change affects roughly 3% of queries in languages such as German, Chinese, and Arabic, but the impact is higher in more heavily-spammed languages. For example, 5% of Polish queries change to a degree that a regular user might notice.