How to deal with 1 product in 1 country and 3 languages?
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After reading multiple posts on dealing with multilanguage sites (also checked http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=12a5507889c20461&hl=en), I still haven't got an answer to a very specific question I have.
Please allow me to give some background:
I'm working for the official Belgian Yellow Pages (part of Truvo), and as you might know in Belgium, we have to deal with 3 official languages (BE-nl, BE-fr, BE-de | the latter is out of scope for this question) and on top of that we also have a large international audience (BE-en).Furthermore, Belgium is very small, meaning that someone living in the French part of Belgium (ex. Liège) easily might look for information in the Dutch part of Belgium (ex. Antwerpen) without having to switch websites/language.
Since 1968 (http://info.truvo.be/en/our-company/) we have established 3 different brands, each brand is adapted to a language, each has a clear language specific connotation:
for the BE-nl market: we have the brand "gouden gids"
for the BE-fr market: we have the brand "pages dor"
for the BE-en market we have the brand "golden pages"Logically, this results in 3 websites: www.goudengids.be, www.pagesdor.be, www.goldenpages.be each serving a specific language and containing specific language messages and functionalities, but, off course, serving a part of the content that is similar for all websites regardless of the language.
So we do have following links ex.
http://www.goudengids.be/united-consultants-nv-antwerpen-2000/
http://www.pagesdor.be/united-consultants-nv-antwerpen-2000/
http://www.goldenpages.be/united-consultants-nv-antwerpen-2000/When I want to stick with the separate brands for the same content, how do I make sure that Google shows the desired url when searching in resp. google.be (dutch), google.be (french) google.be (english)?
Kind Regards
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Thank you for your answer. I
About Google Translate, tx for the tip but, the point is that I need/want to stick to separate domains because each domain is related to a (strong) brandname that is targeted per language.
Indeed, the three domains are in different languages, but our basic content (business directory listings/names/adresses) is of course the same for all domains.
Kind regards
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I'd suppose getting a considerable amount of links from the respective language for each domain should make sure the respective domain shows up in google when searching in the respective language ... e. g. getting links from French site for the French domain, from Dutch sites for the Dutch domain, etc.
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Couldn't you just put all the content on one domain in one place and then embed Google Translate? It puts a drop down menu on your site and allows the visitor to select their language and then translates the content of the page into that language. I don't know how reliable the translation is myself, but I would think it is pretty accurate.
It sounds like each of your three domains are in different languages, correct? I would think you won't get hit with any kind of duplicate content issues precisely because they are in different languages. I might have a link on each of your pages to the other two and mention they can read it in that language. Google may make the connection that way.
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