Translated Pages

I honestly cant figure out where to put this post - it covers so many topics..


I received an email from someone who runs a site similar to one of mine (vBulletin FAQ) - the biggest difference, is that his site is in French.

He has asked permission to translate my articles to French and use them on his site. Offering links in return.

What I am wondering, is if I translated the articles to French, and hosted them on my site along with the english version, would there be duplicate content issues? What about if I allow the other site to replicate the articles and host them on their site?

Also, do you think SEs would place a stronger value of the site as a whole if we offered other language versions of our content?

Any other thoughts??


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I recently had all the pages on one of my english sites translated to spanish and published. I sincerely hope there is no penalty. Google quickly indexed the pages and started serving spanish ads. Since visitors find the site with searches on spanish terms I don't see how anyone could know or care that the same content is presented in one or more other languages. Since it doubled the size of my site I assume that made it stronger.

All of this was done in the last month and the new pages have begun to generate a small adsense income. It's to soon to say much else.

I think keeping the two parts of the site in synch is going to be hard. Unless your french is really good I would think letting him translate in exchange for links would be a good idea.

 

Just get him to paraphrase the content rather than doing a direct translation.

 

That doesnt answer my question about translating the pages and keeping them on my site

 

Anyone have any thoughts about this?

 

I've been considering this for one of my sites.

I would just go ahead and translate and publish. I dont think anyone could tell you for sure about wether or not it would hit some sort of dup content filter. But I seriously doubt it would. I would think that translated pages (even if they are actually duplicate) would only be a benefit when they are on the same domain. Google should ignore this type of duplication when it occurs on the same domain. You are simply offering YOUR content to a wider audience.

A proper translation done by somebody who knows the language would be better than a translation using an automated translator tool. The automated translation will often phrase things in such a way as to be duplicate content, where as a tranlation done by somebody who knows the syntax, conjecture, phrasing, and nuances of the language would create a translation that could not be seen as duplicate by a SE that would simply try to translate using an automated script to check to see if there is duplication in other languages.

Long run-on sentances, like that last one, may even confuse the hell out of a google bot Hope it did not confuse you, the reader.

But I personlay doubt google even bothers to check for duplication in other languages. Of couse, I could be wrong. But I think it is fraught with too many problems for google to make any conclusive conclusions on what would be classified as duplication when it comes to languages.

 

I've yet to come across someone who has experienced any problems from hosting translated versions of their pages.

A clients pages translated from English to French, Italian and Spanish all do well in the search engines (over 3 years now). Each version links to the others - no problems associated with interlinking either.

If you are consideing this, I wouldn't waste my time with machine translations - they leave a lot to be desired. If you can get someone fluent in the language it will result in better content for your site.

PS - it opens a whole new world for inbound links.

 

PSS == I knoooooowwwww

 

Placing the translated version(s) onto a sub-domain(s) is probably the way to go.

 

Hmmmmm.....

 

The sub-domains will all look like seperate domains all linking to each other. Backlink Bonus.

And you can do link trades, and directory submissions for the individual sub-domains for each language.

Add 3 new languages and quadruple your traffic (potentialy). Depending on how much actual internet traffic there is from countries for those languages and surfers looking for your type of site.

 

I highly doubt a translation equals duplicate content. Reasons:

1. Google isn't THAT clever to work out it's a 1:1 translation.
2. A translation is never 1:1 anyway, ask two experts to translate the same text into the same language and they won't type the same.
3. Duplicate content penalty is to avoid needless duplicates. A translation serves a very good purpose so it would be VERY wrong if they did penalize it.

So I'd get those translations myself. You will know your English AdSense track record, based on that it should be easy to find out the predicted ROI if you pay for translations in all the big (40m+ populations IMO = German, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Chinese, Hindi, Russian and a few others) languages.