How well does Google's crawlers understand foreign websites?

[MassivePrime]

I speak 5 languages and therefore have the opportunity to do on-page SEO and content writing for 5 different cultures. This question to me has much to do with the way Google translator works. It doesn't, trust me! Which then makes me wonder how the web crawlers, which are designed with English in mind, can fairly and equally attribute the same ranking points to a foreign website.

Since Google seems to use sematic search technology I'm wondering if foreign sites have it easier or not.

Any ideas?

[gfiorelli1]

Actually what Russ said is correct. European countries languages, although largely stemming from three different roots (german, latin and slavic), are quite similar in how they work semantically.

In fact, the problems Google may have are related to not European languages, like chinese, japanes or arabic, which are completely different in how they are conceived (just think to chinese or japanes, which are ideograms based). That's also one of the reasons why it took a long time in its history to present a Google version in those languages.

Another thing is if the quality of the regional Googles is high or not, but that could start a long thread

[HiveDigitalInc]

A lot of "semantic" search technology is multi-lingual as it looks at factors like word proximity and collocation which still matter regardless of language. Moreover, I am fairly certain Google has teams of developers dedicated to search in multiple languages. While you can expect that they wont be quite as sophisticated in a non-english language search engine, whatever gains you might find in that Google isn't as "smart" simply means that more people can effectively compete against you.