Couple of basic questions ref translations and regional stuff

[Chalkie]

Right, i never ever bothered to translate any of my sites ever! Must be a british thing(everyone speaks english now dont they )

I have decided to give it a go anyway, but being the tight arse that i am, initially i am going to use software to translate and bugger the consequences.

My question is not how bad is it to do the dodgy translation bit, however, where would it be best to home the translated versions?

Lets say its a .co.uk site

I add a sub domain es.domain.co.uk, now of course i cannot regionalise it with webmaster tools so how can this be the best way to have translated sites fare better than by using the .es domain and simply translating and building a completely autonomous site? I ask because all my homework has related to using a sub domain and not a folder like - xxxwww.domain.co.uk/es

Is it that you can only really get a decent result from translating a tld like .com and org etc?

So lets say i decide to go down the domain.es route, would copying the complete site into spanish show as a copy of the original english version and be penalised or would it fare ok?

Like i say, simple basic questions but ones that would be well worth having the answers for.

[Chips]

I would hesitate to use a boxed translator. More times than not the content ends up not making sense and is choppy at best. I'll send you a contact I have that is relatively low cost and has done some work for me.

As for the .co.uk tld... I think you would be better off to use a .com or a country specific tld.

I am curious about the duplicate content too, I have not suffered from a word for word English/German page I have, in fact the German page has a higher PR and ranks ok on Google.de

I did see the Wordpress plug ins that auto translate into a gazillion languages but I hesitate to use one due to the dup. content issue.

[21Local]

GaryTheScubaGuy wrote an excellent post on this topic earlier this year: https://www.gpwa.org/forum/advanced-...es-180352.html

Spanish can be throughout the entire Western Hemisphere, Spain, etc., so I would not regionalize it in Webmaster Tools.

Subdomain or subdirectory both have their pros and cons, but are pretty much equivalent to my mind. A subdomain keeps your site language signals more concentrated, but to Google is more like 'starting over' a new site than using a subdirectory. Going for the full top level domain (.es for example) is a step better than subdomains.

We have a client who translated just their home page into several major languages, and put them in subdirectories, linked them off of the home page, and a week later was ranking in the top 10 for major gaming keyphrases in these languages. Mind you, this is a well established site, with great rankings in english already, so it had the ranking power to accomplish that.

Chips is exactly right. Avoid the boxed translators. Machine translation is garbage and doesn't convert. It also ends up being a drain on your english operations, because you're spreading the PR from your main site into these non-converting pages, instead of keeping it concentrated.

[oc+]

We did exactly what you are thinking of doing.

We set up a sub domain for each of the respective languages and used G to translate them. They were absolutely awful but we are slowly translating the other pages. IE German and Spanish now done.

We used webmaster tools to target only the smaller countries. IE Czech.

We even targeted Turkey to Germany as apparently it is still illegal over there, and we get quite a lot of Turkish users.

Countries like Spain and France we left without targeting as most of the planet speak Spanish and French seems to be a popular language, particularly in Africa.

We were not penalised for translating the content as whilst in reality it is the same, it's in a different language. Would G penalise Bing.es?

The PR went up with the homepage pretty much immediately although link building was hard at first there are enough directories and manual submitters out there to do this with foreign directories. Our serps on the foreign pages are not as high as we would like but our backlinking on these is probably only set at 1%

If you need a list of foreign directories let me know.

[Chalkie]

Yes please a list of foreign directories would be very helpful.

[oc+]

This list will give you a start just select which language/country:

http://www.web-directories.ws/Regional/Europe/

It wont let me attach French and German dirs. Pm me if you want them mailed over, 300 directories for each language.