Negative SEO Effect When Running Multiple Language Versions???

Discussion in 'Search Engine Optimization' started by sunseven, Oct 7, 2009.

  1. #1
    I'm running the wordpress global translator http://www.nothing2hide.net/wp-plugins/wordpress-global-translator-plugin/ on one my clients blogs and when looking at google's webmaster tools it's showing me a bunch of red flags that's starting to make me nervous. Here's some of what I'm concerned about

    KEYWORDS SECTION

    1.) In keywords section where goog displays the most common keywords found when crawling your site. Quite a bit of foreign words are appearing very high up in the list. Keyword #5 and 6 are displaying a word from another language and lots of foreign words are sprinkled thoroughout the top 200 list displayed. I would say 50% of the top 200 words are showing words from another language. Do you think this is having any negative effect or confusing google as what the site is about?

    CRAWL ERRORS
    2.) Goog's webmaster tools is showing 63 crawl errors all saying "network unreachable" for a bunch of the foreign language versions. When using this plugin it creates a new directory for each of the languages so the urls look like this www.yourdomain.com/blog/ar/ or /fr or /fi or /uk etc.. So all 63 crawl errors are pointing to urls like this. Any suggestions, feedback or opinions about this?

    DUPLICATE META DESCRIPTIONS
    3.) And finally it's triggering a bunch of duplicate meta descriptions.

    So my first thoughts have been I should just block all the the foreign language directories in my robots.txt file which I'm sure would eliminate the issue but I just wanted to get everyone's feedback on this and see what your thoughts are. Thanks
     
    sunseven, Oct 7, 2009 IP
  2. Pixelrage

    Pixelrage Peon

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    #2
    My guess would be to look into the new "canonical" tag, and point the foreign version of the site to the English one. That way, the two won't be seen as duplicates, and the English version will get the credit of being the original.
     
    Pixelrage, Oct 7, 2009 IP