Could multiple languagues on one site be bad for SEO???
-
Our site is has content in English and in Spanish. The spanish side was translated by me, Spanish is my first language, so i know that the translations are good and its original content. We were Pandalized/Penguinnized pretty bad earlier this year. We have completely cleaned our site of anything that could be considered thin content or grey hat techniques. An associate is telling me that we need to put the spanish version of the site on its own domain, does this make sense to anyone?
The spanish side of the site gets only about 5% of the visitors, bu i still don't see the logic in taking all those pages and putting them on a different domain. Would this help recover from Panda/Penguin.
Thanks
-
Hi!
I don't know why my fellow associate here is saying you have to put your spanish version of the site in a separate domain. The ideal should be for us to have a look to your site in order to judge and really try helping you.
In general, a multilingual site - if everything (paginations, faceted navigations, thin content, duplicated and substantially duplicated content) is fine - should not have problem just because it is multilingual.
The only reasons why we can see duplicated content across all languages is when, for instance, not everything has been translated in spanish. A classic can be the news or blog posts, which maybe the site produce just in english but present in every language mirror and the site has such a bad arquitecture to present URLs like these:
where post.html is actually the same post but URL duplicated 3 times.
But, apart those cases (quite extreme, even though - I assure you - existing), a multilingual site per se is not a reason for a Panda penalization.
Penguin, than, is all about links, so - again - I don't see a causation or correlation between multilingual site and Penguin. I mean... if a multilingual site has been hit by Penguin is not because its multilingual, but because it has an anchor text overoptimized link profile.
Then... a subcarpet or an external domain? It depends from your marketing needs. If you are thinking to expand strongly in a foreign market, somehow to make it a distinct entity respect the original one, then to create a new site in a new domain name (generic if you target a language, cTld if you target a country) is maybe the best choice.
But in your case the choice to have it inside your main domain seems ok to me.
Finally, to make things clear. If multilingual site was a problem, surely Google would have started deprecating its use (and it is not doing that, all the contrary) and Brands like Apple would not create their site using that style (try to go to www.apple.es and see what happen...)
-
Do you know of someone who has done a case study on this that I can look over? I appreciate your input and would like to verify it.
-
hi.
your second statement is good only if you want to target Spain as country, not spanish speaking people all over the world, as .es is countrg level termination, hence automatically geotarget Spain. Also from an user point of view, if your target in not only the Spanish people, is not a good idea, because Mexican or people from Latin America will not probably click on that domain, but yes to .mx and so on.
Also you first assumption is not correct. Google don't consider translations as duplicated content, because they aren't. The only problem translation may have is they are of content not yours and you don't attribute the copyright of the content with a link to the original source (aka: you try to make looking like it was created by you).
-
It absolutely makes sense!
Why?
Google is great at picking up on duplicate content, even if it's in another language.
Benefits of separating:
Register with a .es domain name and you can geo-target spanish speaking clients easier.
No duplicate content penalties.
Increased, targeted traffic = better conversions (more sales)How?
Just use the same design/structure for your new site
301 the old pages to their new locationsCost?
Low if you use the same design
Have to pay your SEO for the work -
Well, could you do a sub-domain on your existing website ? How do you have then structured in your website right now ? Is it easy to detect, something like yourdomain.com/en, yourdomain.com/es ?
If I were you, I would check to see evidence that the spanish translation of your website living under the same domain indeed caused the penalty.
-
It does make a small amount of sense if you were targeting spain as a country (so a country based domain)
Translations should be fine on the same site- The best fix I can think of is to make sure the information on the spanish side (since you have created it 100% orginal) doesn't cover the exact same subjects.
At 5% traffic it doesn't make time/economical sense to create a whole new site (a question has to be asked around amount of income/sales from the 5%)
Hope that helps
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Technical SEO - Where to begin?
Hi all, I'm looking to learn more about technical SEO. My background was digital marketing/PR where I learned the importance of links, of anchor text, of page speed, of improving UX signals, of SSL, utilising things like Google My Business etc. However, I find I am chasing my tail when it comes to things like understanding JS/CSS/log file analysis etc. I've tried reading so many articles on the subjects and I just find it so damn confusing. AnugalarJS/BackboneJS. Fetching & rendering, URL parameters...etc. I know from my own experiments that JS pages struggle to rank and I've created two very similar pages, one without JS, one with JS (which had far more links) and the non-JS page ranked far higher. So, I suppose I'm asking for some help with how to begin learning this stuff. I find the articles on Moz, Search Engine Land etc to be a bit confusing...maybe I'm not technically minded enough! Cheers, Rhys
Technical SEO | | SwanseaMedicine0 -
One-Pager and SEO
We're building a page that is going to feature over 31 people as difference makers in their field. We're unveiling one a day for an entire month. The very early mockup of the page has name, pic, some bio info, and a link to open up a new window with the full bio. I would love to have all of the bio content for all of the people on the page (and indexable), but I'm not sure how to do that while still being able to hide the full bios until they are expanded. Anybody have any tips that are SEO-friendly and/or examples of a page that is built like this and ranks well. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | spackle0 -
How to transition a traditional site to app format with least amount of impact on SEO
My company is an e-commerce platform and within the last year have started working on app based websites. These are not apps that have to be downloaded but rather the site runs in the browser and is essentially one page of content. We have created an SEO layer that allows us to provide Google information as if there are individual pages. I'm looking for SEO advice on transitioning from what we call our vstores to an app store because the code specified by Google to use has shown to have negative impact on SEO rankings. While we have worked out many bugs and it has gotten better, just want to be doing everything I can to help any of our merchants that will be transitioning. Here are some of the specific issues I'm running into Duplicate Content merchants can have up to 3 stores running simultaneously with the same content just displayed slightly different
Technical SEO | | marketing_zoovy.com
ex. sportsworldchicago.com, app.sportsworldchicagocom, m.sportsworldchicago.com a) What is the best way to control having the content be associated with the main domain
b) Should they be submitting all the sites to google for indexing, I only wanted sitemap submitted for the main domain
c) our end goal will be for the app. to just be the main site Loading issues, our apps essentially have a loading message. I think sometimes this is picked up as an ISE or timeout error for Google and other SERPS. I think it is also contributing to a higher site abandonment. We have changed an used different loading page messages, but have yet to find one I feel is a KEEPER. ex. site TheGrillLife.com - this one does not show the site in the background while loading. On other sites we have the site shown in the background while it loads. This is what is showing as indexed for the homepage, currently working with my tech team on it: The Grill Life <cite style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22px;">www.thegrilllife.com/</cite> issue: API request failure (likely an ISE). uri: http://www.thegrilllife.com/. _cmd: appReviewsList. domain: www.thegrilllife.com. release: 201314|20130619133400. For e-commerce sites do you think the product content on category and sub-category pages is enough for Google or other search engines to determine relevancy for indexing. In some of the transitions content is being removed due to an effort to transition to a cleaner and faster design and layout. Thanks for any advice or suggestions in advance. Christy0 -
Multiple domain SEO strategy
Hi Mozzers I'm an AM at a web dev. We're building a new site for a client who sells paint to different markets: Paint for boats Paint for construction industry Paint for, well you get the idea! Would we be better off setting up separate domains - boatpaintxxx.com, housepaintxxx.com, etc - and treat each as a searate microsites for standalone SEO activity or have them as individual pages/sub doms from a single domain - paints4all.com or something? From what i've read today, including the excellent Beginners Guide - I'm guessing there's no definitive answer! Feedback appreciated! Thanks.
Technical SEO | | rikmon0 -
Multiple domains pointing to same site
Over the years, we have acquired a great number of variations of our domains, or industry-specific domains to protect our brand. Currently, the majority of those domains are parked at the registrars. Would we do any harm to our rankings if we pointed the dormant domains to our website (www.ellsworth.com)? If not, are there any recommendations as the best way to do this, or just point them to the same IP?
Technical SEO | | Ellsworth0 -
How can you get the right site links for your site?
Hello all, I have been trying to get Google to list relevant site links for my site when you type in our brand name, Loco2 or for when Loco2 comes up in a search result. Different things come up when you search Loco2 and Loco 2. We would like site links to look like how they do when you search Loco 2. However Loco2 is our brand name, NOT Loco 2. Does anyone know why Google is doing this and whether we can influence results? We have done as much as possible via Google webmaster, in terms of specifying the links we DO NOT want Google to list for Loco2. However, when you search "Loco2", results only show simple site links. Ideally what we want is: Loco2 to be recognised as the brand NOT Loco 2 The same results (substantial, identical) for Loco2 as for Loco 2 (think o2 and o 2) For the site links to reflect the main pages of our site (Times & Tickets, Engine Room forum etc.) Many thanks in advance! Anila
Technical SEO | | anilababla0 -
How should I structure a site with multiple addresses to optimize for local search??
Here's the setup: We have a website, www.laptopmd.com, and we're ranking quite well in our geographic target area. The site is chock-full of local keywords, has the address properly marked up, html5 and schema.org compliant, near the top of the page, etc. It's all working quite well, but we're looking to expand to two more locations, and we're terrified that adding more addresses and playing with our current set-up will wreak havoc with our local search results, which we quite frankly currently rock. My question is 1)when it comes time to doing sub-pages for the new locations, should we strip the location information from the main site and put up local pages for each location in subfolders? 1a) should we use subdomains instead of subfolders to keep Google from becoming confused? Should we consider simply starting identically branded pages for the individual locations and hope that exact-match location-based urls will make up for the hit for duplicate content and will overcome the difficulty of building a brand from multiple pages? I've tried to look for examples of businesses that have tried to do what we're doing, but all the advice has been about organic search, which i already have the answer to. I haven't been able to really find a good example of a small business with multiple locations AND good rankings for each location. Should this serve as a warning to me?
Technical SEO | | LMDNYC0 -
Seo on a dk site
hi my client has asked if we can seo their dk site , my question is does all link building and article submission have to be in danish
Technical SEO | | Westernoriental0