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This is my first post here...I hope to have posted my thread in the right place...
I have a website translated in 4 languages:
english - german - french - dutch
Now I wonder if it's better to have only one domain with the different translation on it, or four different domain each one optimized for the own language...
What should you suggest me?
Thanks a lot in advance!
d-force
I’ll go for 4 different websites, each with the correct country extension (co,uk, ge, fr ….). I have two reasons for this.
1. You will find that the national SE’s normally only accept sites from that country. By creating a country specific site, you have a much better chance of marketing in that country.
2. By creating 4 different sites, you have the option to link the sites together and in this way improve your pagerank
Good point about the subdomains, but are you 100% sure that a ru.mainsite.com will get accepted just as well as a www.mainsite.ru
I’ll go for 4 different websites, each with the correct country extension (co,uk, ge, fr ….). I have two reasons for this.1. You will find that the national SE’s normally only accept sites from that country. By creating a country specific site, you have a much better chance of marketing in that country.
2. By creating 4 different sites, you have the option to link the sites together and in this way improve your pagerank
The only advantage of having the TLDs is in case of people restricting searches to (nation) TLD only.
Using 4 different domains means 1/4th of the incoming links for each site, 1/4th of the deeplinks - 1/4th of the content of a single domain.
I would not especially recommend interlinking 4 separate, closely related domains. You may very well find that Google and other SEs don't "appreciate" closely related content on different domains (think identical file/directory structures, identical image names and pixel sizes etc).
I have a guide that is translated into 3 languages and ranks well for English, and searches restricted to the three translated languages, which is principal manner in which foreign language searches appear to be conducted.
First of all I want to thank you for all your kind and appreciate suggestions.
Some months ago I have opted for the solution in 4 different websites (one per language) but at the moment only two are correctly indexed from Google. And the other two (above all the german version) looks like banned from google and I cannot understand the reason.
I also have tried to link it from a PR5 page but without any results...
Is it possible for you to have a look if I give you the Url? (If not there are no problem and I apologige for my question).
PS I am sorry for my english but I am not american user...
Ciao
dforce
Some months ago I have opted for the solution in 4 different websites (one per language) but at the moment only two are correctly indexed from Google. And the other two (above all the german version) looks like banned from google and I cannot understand the reason.
Hi
It could be that google considers the translations as mirror sites (whether on the same site or on a separate domain) and thus one or the other gets banned? I'm not real sure--just asking.
If they are on the same server, that might be your problem. Recently, Google has not been liking related sites.
Also, do the sites that are not ranking have inbound links from sources independent of the links to the other sites? If not, that might also be part of your problem (This last thought is just a guess on my part. It may be that independent links won't help if Google decides the sites are closely related).
This anti-relatedness factor is something fairly new, and I'm not yet sure how multiple languages should be handled under this scenario. In the past, I probably would have recommended different domains.
And thank you for your kind replies.
The four sites are on the same server. The four sites are linked together in all the pages with a flag...
Could you be so kind to watch one of 'em?
www.accommodations-tuscany-florence.co.uk (this is the one who is indexed without problems...)
I really appreciate and thank you for your help and useful suggestions.
d-force
The four sites are on the same server. The four sites are linked together in all the pages with a flag...
dforce - I think the above, in conjunction with what I'm guessing are related inbound links, is a good part of your problem.
What about the inbound links? You didn't answer that question....
Note that posting your url is against the WebmasterWorld terms of service, so that if you don't delete it, a moderator will.
I haven't seen any evidence of this, so I wouldn't worry about it (yet).
What you mean for inbound links when you say: 'do the sites that are not ranking have inbound links from sources independent of the links to the other sites?
Thanks for akind reply! :)
Thanks a lot!
d-force
What you mean for inbound links when you say: 'do the sites that are not ranking have inbound links from sources independent of the links to the other sites?
Links are like recommendations, so it's important that they come from sources that are unrelated. What you should look for in your backlinks is whether your inbound links for each site come from different places.
If, suppose, there was a European Widget Guide, and you had links to all four of your sites from the same page, that could be bad for you, mainly because your sites are already on the same server, and already interlinked.
Google, looking at all this interlinking, would think... "we think these sites are brothers, because they are on the same server and they link to each other from every page... and now the same site is recommending all four of them. Now we know they are brothers, and maybe the site that recommends them is another brother too. Just to be safe we will not trust that recommendation, because it looks so suspicious."
So, by "independent links," I mean inbound links from sites that are not related to each other or to you.
You should try to get links to the German site from other German sites, and those German sites should not be linking to the English, French, or Dutch sites... definitely not from the same page.
For the time being, don't drop the links you have. Just try to get extra ones from other sources. If you get enough of them, the fact that these sites are as close as they are won't stand out so much. It's perfectly reasonable for the user to interlink the sites with the flag arrangement you describe.
If your sites were all going after the same phrases in the same language, I'd suggest you put your sites on different servers and minimize the interlinking. Moving some of the sites to a different server might not be a bad idea... but it's not easy to move a site, and the sites are definitely interlinked anyway.
So, for now, just try getting more links. Since your German site seems to be the weakest, I'd try for links to that site first. Also, vary the link text going into each site. Otherwise, Google will view the pattern of many similar links with suspicion too.
Similar sites on same IP address
Ranking issues
[webmasterworld.com...]
I'm increasingly thinking the problem is a combination of site similarities that... beyond crosslinking... would include...
- hosting similarities
- targeting similarities (if sites are entirely in different languages, I would think there's no overlap. If there's a bunch of English common to all, there might be a problem)
- inbound links (if a high enough percentage are from the same source, this can be a problem. Links from a common web developer, eg, or a common parent company, might stand out)
- outbound links (if the links pages on all the sites are the same, this would stand out on a web map for Google. So, even though you're translating the site, I wouldn't keep the outbound links for all the sites the same... For each site, I'd have different outbound links pages with different outbounds entirely, grouped by language. I realize in multi-lingual Europe, people know more than one language... but you can't have it both ways, which is to say have mono-lingual sites and multi-lingual outbound links).
My guess is that if all the sites were on the same domain, the inbound link requirements would be similar... ie, if the search targets were competitive, the target pages for each language would require inbound links to those pages, with relevant anchor text in the appropriate language, in order for those pages to rank well. So you don't automatically eliminate the requirement of inbound links for each language section if you combined everything into one site.
And, if everything were on one site, you'd also probably still want to have different outbound links for each language.
The main difference right now between one site versus several sites right now is probably that related sites on the same IP are currently under suspicion, so you have to be more aware of what you're doing.
This is all a series of educated guesses, though, based on observation. It's not a definitive answer.
What I'm getting from this discussion is that Google doesn't penalize you if you have the same site translated into other languages. But only if most of the site is translated?
My esite sells one of a kind items. Because of this, merchandise is always changing, so it wouldn't be possible (or economically feasible) to constantly have all of the site in another language. If only the home page and menu pages were translated, would this be sufficient?
yahoo is another matter cos at the moment even Tim doesn't know why it does what it does ...some poor souls appear to have been banned overthere just for having a doctype ..or not ...
And from the look of the new MSN ...if its spammy enough they'll give you all of page one ..and two ..and three ..and ...
