Linking to English Pages from Non-English

[Timetraveler]

If you have a non-English page, and link to an article on your site that is written in English, is this considered spam when no other version exists in that language on your site. Basically we translated the most popular pages on our site into different languages because it a very mult-lingual nation, but did not translate the pages they are inner linking to so the links just go to the English inner pages.

I believe it trigged some sort of interlinking spam. The anchor text to the english pages is the non-english version as well. Thanks in advance.

[aristotle]

If you put nofollow tags on those links, people could still find the pages but you likely would avoid a penalty. You might lose some internal "link juice" but there are ways to minimize this.

[rainborick]

It would also be a good idea to check out Google's advice for multilingual sites to make sure you're giving Google the right signals about the relationship between the translated pages - particularly the directory structure of your site and the use of <link rel="alternate" hreflang="xx"> tags.

[Timetraveler]

Thanks fellas.

Aristotle - how do you minimize internal link juice if I do nofollow?

I also am going to put 'English version' next to any link as to not create an 'instaback' click, or confuse readers for those that may not speak english for now until I translate all those pages for good.

[aristotle]

Aristotle - how do you minimize internal link juice if I do nofollow?

Well if you put one nofollow link on the same page with a lot of internal dofollow links, then the dofollow links will carry most of the link juice to other parts of the site, and only a little will be lost. For example, if there are 19 internal dofollow links and one nofollow link on the same page, only 5% (1/20) will be lost.

Also, if you don't don't send much link juice to pages that have a nofollow link, then there isn't as much to potentially be lost.

Years ago I used to draw vector diagrams for my sites to visualize different ways to distribute the link juice. One basic principle is to flow more link juice to the important pages and less to the unimportant pages. Another principle is to put a lot of internal links on pages that have external outgoing links, so that the internal links will keep most of the link juice within the site. Thus, on any given page, you want to always have a high ratio of internal links to external links.

[Timetraveler]

Thanks aristotle, very interesting and something I am going to test on another site, especially your last paragraph!

[aristotle]

Timetraveler -- Another thing I should have mentioned is that I always avoid using nofollow links, either internal or external, except in very special cases. I suggested it in your case of non-English anchor text, but view that as a special case. Another special case would be if I sold a link, but I've never done that. I've gotten some offers over the years, but they wanted dofollow links anyway.

[EditorialGuy]

Dunno about non-English to English, but I link to non-English pages when appropriate (usually adding a link to Google Translate in the annotation). Links are citations, and there's nothing spammy about citing a useful resource just because the resource is in another language.

[aristotle]

Timetraveler wrote:
I am going to test on another site, especially your last paragraph!

It might not be a good idea to make a sudden big change in a site's internal link structure. This is one of the most important aspects of a site's design, and google's algorithm might react negatively to a sudden change. Gradual small changes might be safer.