We’ve all grown accustomed to the idea that search engines take a word or phrase that you write, and then retrieve a list of results the search engines have determined is the most relevant to your search. One thing international businesses should take into consideration is these words and phrases change when they’re in different languages. Searching for something in english shouldn’t return results in a different language since the user won’t be able to get anything out of them. Not even the introduction of image-based searching changes this since the user still chooses a language preference for their results. This is important when working with international companies considering search engines return results based on the user’s primary language.
Many sites are utilizing automated translation that takes a single version of the site content and translates it into whatever language the user wants. The accuracy of these translators is always improving, but there’s always the potential of having errors that make the lack of attention to detail stand out like a sore thumb. The more important issue caused by using an on-demand translator is that the numerous translations people might use won’t actually be indexed (included in) by search engines whereas the source material is.
The way to get a multilingual website indexed in each language is to make copies of the source material for each language. This is especially true because search engines aren’t currently able to derive automated translations from the automated tools. By making copies of the source materials in the different languages, the search engines have raw and unique content to crawl for the different languages, and it communicates a level of commitment the site owners had to undergo to make the translated versions. This has the additional benefits of allowing the site to cater to a more specific audience and being able to avoid the mistakes an automated translator might make. The different languages need to be separated some way, and there are different methods that web developers can choose from where each have their advantages and disadvantages.
Separating the languages via a top-level folder (ie. http://www.example.com/en/ & http://www.example.com/es/) allows for a single domain to contain the whole site and every language. This makes it so that each language helps to contribute to a single site’s search engine rankings rather than being dispersed across country specific domain names (ie. http://www.example.co.uk). The centralized location allows for a single address to be shared that then gives the user a choice of the region and/or language they prefer. International website designers can also integrate a language selector to guide users to the corresponding page in the desired language, and Google has tools to ensure each different language section of the site is indexed properly.
In light current client developments this is something we have been researching heavily. We welcome all on-comers who might be interested in more information.