Backlinks from foreign language websites?

[centrum]

Hi

My website is focused on slovakian customers, I instaled google translate tool on my website (english spoken visitors can translate content) - If Im going to get some backlinks from foreign language websites related to  my website is it ok for SEO? Of course Im talking about website significant Page rank. Thanks for answer.

[Aleyda]

Hi there,

In order to rank for specific languages and countries is important that you build a crawlable and indexable site structure, with their own URLs that will be ranked (the Google translate plugin won't help you with this), with optimized content for each one of them, and after, you build links from sites in these countries towards them. Remember the fundamentals of SEO: Is Relevance (relevant text content that is indexed and optimized) and popularity (links, citations, references).

Please take a look at this presentation I did a month ago that will take you through the most important aspects of the process: from researching the best way you should target the audiences (language vs. country targeting), the best type of web structure for your international versions (ccTLDs, subdirectories or subdomains), the usage of specific annotations in order to tell Google the content is in a specific language (hreflang tags), and then of course, identify the appropriate relevant sources for each country to build links from, etc.

To go more in depth with your international SEO strategy, take a look at this post, where I also share some dos and don'ts and finally, these recommendations to take into consideration when developing your international web versions.

As you can see, this cannot be achieved with plugins to automatically translate content, is a real investment to identify the best language / country opportunity and then develop a whole site structure targeting them, this is why it's very important to validate well at the beginning and do a in depth research, so it's cost effective and help you effectively achieve your international SEO goals.

Thanks,

Aleyda

[Solvari]

Building links on fx. english websites that are related to yours can definitely help your site rank better. Try to find a good balance between links from slovakian and non slovakian websites though.

Ask yourself if the link you build would be useful to visitors of that site. If the answer is yes, you can usually say it's a valuable link.