Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I optomized for it by providing a server side language translation option for just those three languages. Since doing so traffic has increased a small amount from each, perhaps 2% in the past 28 days.
In paying attention to results from translated content it became obvious that I need to fix the zero earnings clicks i'm receiving somehow. I didn't realise how much of an issue foreign visitors was for adsense until looking into the problem so i've temporarily turned off the translations.
The problem of foreign clicks has to have been addressed. I'd prefer not to swap out adsense for a foreign friendly affiliate banner or whatnot during the night hours, are there any better solutions? I'm considering registering foreign domains and duplicating the site into four languages if a good solution hasn't been found.
Ideas? I'm sure i'm missing something simple on this one.
Also, are visitors abandoning immediately? If they are, perhaps the translation is not good enough.
server side language translation
Also, don't forget META tags telling the spider and the user's browser what language the page is intended to be read in.
By server side I just mean that visitors don't suffer through any translation proccessing time or queries, it's done before they visit.
The ads that are showing - are they in the same language, or in English only? Importantly, too, are they on-topic?
Also, are visitors abandoning immediately? If they are, perhaps the translation is not good enough.
The ads from Google change to represent the language, even the "ads by Google" text changes languages. I wrote a short bit of code to change the header language meta to represent each language. The ads are also on topic. I can read the four languages well. (J'aime parlez en francais au travaille). The bounce rate is a little higher than in english but not much, perhaps 4% higher overall.
Google treats the same content in multiple languages as unique. Google doesn't however make it easy to rank well in the search engine for other languages. Before shutting down the service I was seeing quite a few clicks with no revenue, enough to know its more than just a reporting delay.
I'm still looking for a solution on the SEO front. New domains or?
Even if you create a separate site for each language and host them in the target country, the CTR may differ depending on the culture of the country. Ads and credit cards are part of the American way of life, but this doesn't apply everywhere.
Not sure what you mean by this. Can Google's spider see what language the page is being displayed in? In other words, does the translated page have a fixed, unique URL?
Google goes by IP. My German server was once crawled by their italian servers and all the chached pages had italian ads on them. Foreign visitors should get ads displayed in their language. The problem only arises I think if they can't translate what is on your page.
IE if I have biologie on my page and get a french user there should be no problem.
Hosting location seems also an issue. My english .com hosted in Berlin is partly not in the international index as Google seems to go here also by IP. So they might assume that what is hosted in Germany is for Germans even if it's in English. Maybe there are legal implications. In the EU there shouldn't be a problem serving each others ads, but maybe serving a German ad in the US (or whereever you are) has tax consequences for Google or legal consequences.
The solution would maybe be some squids in other countries. If that expense is lower than what your internationals bring in is another matter. It depends which country in the world Google has choosen to be able to host international traffic without penalty. Is there one?
The TLD is .de, this could be a reason for the better performance of the German pages.
I remember a Googler somewhere complaining about that .de .fr etc should be served for the country there in.
An algo to decide .de = German is so much easier than analysing the pages language, especially as the usual German Red Tape probably leads to somewhere having an Impressum and other legal pap that's then in German. Then you need to analyse the languages on that page and how they are weight and that for billions of pages leading probably to a cost explosion for Google. So i guess they simply force the web into the algo and not the other way round. Sophistication costs money.
If you have 87 million webservers at 100 pages average then you have 8.7 billion pages to analyse.
Now imagine each page needs a second to analyse. That's 100694 days. So to analyse the whole web in a day they need 100000 servers if a page needs a second to pull, analyse, and store in the database.
Add another second to that analysis and you are at 200000 servers. At $500 a server that would be $100.000.000 to be spent without staff and bandwidth, cooling, storage .. So each character in that algo costs money. And that's not even mentioning statistical variation in the webs performance. If your server is too lame your unprofitable.
The language meta is appended to the articles during translation.
The uri has a /de/ added dring translation.
The uri is search friendly and the keywords in it are also translated.
I use Googles translation API although i've found it to be less than accurate in transfering meanings. (a problem with all automated translators)
The articles enter "draft" status until I give them a once over. Things in English like "Great Post!" just don't hold the same punch when translated. "post" is part of a fence and has nothing to do with the internet for example.
All of this is for not unless I can find a way of having the articles indexed properly. Theres not much use in doing it if the articles are never found. I can see why Google wants local content but forcing multi-language websites to set up multiple domains doesn't seem like the best answer.
But Google also gives the user the choice of searching pages from their own country. Google decides this by either the hosting location, or the country TLD. If you want this traffic then you need a separate site.
[edit]Sorry, submitted this before it was ready[/edit]
[edited by: HarryM at 6:57 pm (utc) on Sep. 29, 2007]
