Could multiple languagues on one site be bad for SEO???

[858-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

[gfiorelli1]

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:

• www.domain.com/blog/post.html
• www.domain.com/es/blog/post.html
• www.domain.com/fr/blog/post.html

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...)

[benjaminspak]

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.

[gfiorelli1]

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).

[benjaminspak]

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 locations

Cost?

Low if you use the same design
Have to pay your SEO for the work

[NakulGoyal]

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.

[OnlineAssetPartners]

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