What Website Translation Buttons are unable to do!
At first glance, clicking on a button to translate your website look like a great idea, and a cheap solution in order to make your website multilingual. The problem is that we have to consider the point of having a multilingual website, and some of the inherent issues associated with using automated translation tools.
One of the well-recognised problems with translation tools is their inability to deal with context, localism, colloquialism, and nuances. This is the inevitable result of direct translation versus contextual translation, where language helps to make emotional connection with your audience (see our previous article on this subject). However, that is a linguistic and marketing issue, which is a completely different subject.
The purpose of multilingual websites is to expand your addressable market, extend the website’s reach, increase your traffic, and ultimately increase enquiries and sales.
In this article we are addressing the technical issues, and the impact on your website’s performance on Search Engines visibility.
Here are 5 key areas that translation tools fail websites:
1. Indexing
Automated translation buttons activate the tool to translate the page in real-time. In reality, no page in the alternative language exists, so there is nothing for Search Engines to index. This is a simple issue to explain. If a page is not indexed, then it will not appear in the search results; and a page that does not exist, cannot be indexed.
How indexing works
Search engines “index”, or record, your pages on their database, and display them to relevant searches.
When you deploy a proper multilingual site, your site has physical copies of every page in each language that you have included. Your developer has 2 options when implementing multiple languages. Option 1 is to have your “Main Language” without a main language URL marker, and additional languages with language markers, or Option 2, treat all languages equally with language markers for all.
In the first example, the main language page URLs will be in the following format “mydomain/page-name” (so no language marker), with additional languages with language marker “mydomain/language/page-name”.
In the second example, all language variants will have a page marker, so if your main language is English, the pages will be mydomain/en/page-name. Additional languages are usually defined by the URLs that have a language marker, so mydomain/es/page-name for Spanish, mydomain/fr/page-name for French, and so on.
Either approach is fine and works for Search Engines, as they recognise the pages, and will index them, which means your pages will show in searches based on the language the visitor is searching.
2. Language Meta Tag
When you use a automated tool, the translation is displayed in the original page with the original language Meta Tag, whilst translating the content. So your page is indicating to the Search Engine that the language of the page is one thing (original language), whilst the content is in fact in a different language. Not very helpful for the search engines, or the browser in order to load the correct characters, formatting, display, etc.
How Language Tag works
Search engines look for signals to figure out the language of the page, including the URL. They can crawl, analyse, and determine the language of your page. However, you can make it easy for them by adding a Language Meta Tag in each page header, to indicate the language of the page. This helps browsers to display correct characters, as well as search engines indexing.
Language Meta Tag can also indicate the version of the language, for example en-GB (for UK English), en-US (US English), as well as different variation of Spanish (es-ES for Spain vs es-CO for Columbian Spanish), fr-FR for traditional French vs fr-CA for Canadian French, etc.
3. Search Parameters
With automated tools, pages in different languages do not exist on your website, therefore your website cannot be selected by search engines, as only your main language pages have been indexed. This means you will not get any traffic to your website other than for the original language of your pages, and for searches in the language of your website.
How Search Parameters works
Clients generally search in their own language. This means your keywords, Meta Tags, and content has to be in their language, in order for search engines to index and include your pages in their results page.
4. Bookmarks
If visitors are interested in your page, they may want to create a “Bookmark” for the page so that they can return to the page at a later date.
How Bookmarks work
When using a multilingual website, each language and page has its own distinct URL, which means bookmarks are saved in the language the visitor was viewing them originally. This means bookmarks will open the page the visitors were looking at previously in the correct language.
When you are using an auto-translate tool, the URL is always the same, so there is no distinction between the URLs of different languages. This means, when a bookmark is made, the page is saved in the original language and not the language the visitor was viewing.
5. Content Volume
You may have heard the saying “Content is King”, which is a shorthand for volume, relevance, and recency of the content. These parameters are considered by the Search Engine to assess your website content value, relevance, and authority.
How content volume works
When implementing multilingual website with proper translation and pages, the volume of your content goes up exponentially, as each page has as many copies as the number of languages you have on your website. This means a website with 10 pages but in 2 languages will have 20 pages, and with 3 languages has 30 pages, etc.
If you are using an automated translation tool, the content of your website is limited to the original language, no matter how many language buttons you have on your website. As we have mentioned, other languages do not exist on your website, so they do not get indexed, hence they do not exist!
Summary
Multilingual websites are designed to attract traffic from different languages, because your target market and clients speak different languages. If your site does not appear on searches, you will not get traffic from searches carried out in different languages. Adding, a button to do an auto-translate does not magically create new pages, and is a pointless exercise.
If you want to attract traffic from multiple language searches, you must have those languages physically on your website, so that Search Engines index and include them in their results pages.
To create multilingual website, contact us so that we can discuss your needs.