I Want to Translate My Sites

Two questions from an AdSense point of view

[myrrh]

After reading various threads here and hearing mixed results from people having their sites translated, I've decided to give it a try. Questions:

1) How can I research which languages to target first?

2) Do I add the translated pages to my existing domains or put them on new domains?

[LifeinAsia]

1) Look at your site logs and see which countries send you a lot of visitors. If there are a lot of people in a certain language interested in your content, target that language first.

2) Either way.

[OnlyToday]

Google "Top Ten Internet Languages" and click on the first result.

If you are not changing character sets for Chinese or Japanese you will find Spanish, French and German to be your best choices.

Use the proper meta tag for each page's language, however you'll find that Google and AdSense don't need that and will detect the language of each page automatically.

[edited by: OnlyToday at 5:56 pm (utc) on Nov. 14, 2008]

[netmeg]

2) Do I add the translated pages to my existing domains or put them on new domains?

I have no idea if or how this affects AdSense because I've never put AdSense on a site with another language, but in a general sense, when I've done sites with translations, I've put those pages in directories called /de or /cn or /en. Google does a fairly good job of figuring it out.