Bilingual Sites - Pros and Cons

I have several sites in English and want to make them bilingual adding a Spanish version for each page of each site - having this way more unique content.

In terms of Search Engines Optimization and for achieving a better placement in Google searching, is this a good practice? Or could be better to build other sites in Spanish?

Any thoughts and ideas will be welcome and much appreciated.
Thanks in advance people.

 

it's better to add another version of your existing site as the spanish version will benefit from the authority of the english version.

 

Just to be sure...you mean both versions into the same domain, right juliensimon?

 

If you're specifically targeting Spanish visitors, you would be better off having a separate Spanish language site hosted in Spain. This will receive a boost in Google.es whereas Spanish language pages hosted elsewhere on non .es domains won't.

 

Since my visitors come mostly from USA, UK and Canada (and I want to stay on this way)...pages writen in spanish (in english language sites) would not help to boost the site in the english language rankings, isn't it?

 

Well, they would for the words contained on the pages, but since they would be in Spanish, I doubt they would get many search queries.

 

my question at this point is:
Why are you launching a Spanish version. It would help us to come up with the proper answer.

 

Im normally create two blogs with a different language, just like having a twin baby

 

Well, mainly I'm trying to have more unique content that could help the site to get a higher position in Google for english language searching...is it posible?

 

This would be the logic way, the problem is that in spanish the market is so little (Spain and Latin America included) for most of the keywords I'm using...not enough visitors to do business

 

Definately, but it would be a good start to have that content in English!

 

I don't see how adding spanish words would help your rankings for english searches.

 

They are 14 sites with the content already writen in english and almost with all the pages of each site indexed by Google

I've tried this with one little site with good results...but am not totally sure if it was because of the spanish pages added

 

More important, the characters typed into the search will be different.

 

By characters you mean the letters or symbols typed...the only difference between english and spanish characters is the letter "ñ" that actually I avoid its using in spanish texts replacing that kind of words with other similars

 

OK guys for the answers I got it seems to better to make separate sites for the english and spanish versions...unless someone has a different opinion...thanks so much to all of you