I've recently been talking with a client about gaining some links for his Dutch site and we were talking about whether we could get links from any language as long as it was the same subject. Obviously it is always best to get links from sites with the exact same content but I want to know how much significance does Google or the other search engines put on sites with the same topic but different language and whether they see these sites as related content at all.
Getting too much links from the wrong language can make Google think your site is or almost is in the wrong language, and will hurt you heavily for regional Google. Get links from every language, but not too much compared to same language links. Just my point of view as a non-english SEO.
Thats some great advice. Will it matter though if the anchor text is still in the target language. e.g. if you wanted to target the word Bonjour and you have a link from an English site with the anchor text as "Bonjour" will it make a difference to the regional results?
Yes. Check for example some SEO contests, that's better than reading me As you see, these are words are new, so they should be international. However, regional results are quite different. You'll see how in google.es spanish pages rank very good, even if they can't be seen on top 100 at google.com, in google.fr you'll see the same...
Yes, I understand this but thats not really what I'm asking. I want to know if pointing a link from an English page to a French page with the link <a href='French page'>Bonjour</a> will have a signicant difference to pointing a link from a French page with the link <a href='French page'>Bonjour</a> to the French page. I know that sites with only French will rank well in the French Google. That's pretty obvious lol. The theme of my question is more related to the anchor text of a link rather than the content on the page and yes I'm looking at the results on google.fr for any differences that there are.
How does this affect sites (like my own for example) where translations of original content are provided via a link at the top of the entry/page? Cheers, Carl