International SEO / Muti Language Question

[voLdie]

Alright, so I have heard some talk about translating your content / URL structure into native languages and seeing increased success in the corresponding INTL SERPs.

I have had a site that was all polish like 10 years ago that did well but this current site is mostly US / AUS / CA traffic.

I am somewhat nervous and this feels possibly dangerous. I don't know.

I added a plugin gtranslate.io. I grabbed the premium version that has more SEO-optimized features.

I have about 180 pages indexed in Google prior to this but it's now growing (357 now in the index).

I had 3 options here on how to do this.

cTLD i.e. domain.es, domain.fr, domain.nl
No page rank passed and basically different sites so didn't go this route.

Sub Domains i.d. fr.domain.com, es.domain.com, nl.domain.com
Same reason as above.

Sub Directory i.e. domain.com/fr, domain.com/es
I went this route and have all the meta shit in their for languages along with a language picker on the main site.

It's only been four days so no real data to lean on.

I am hoping someone has some experience and can tell me if I am creating a major fuck up here or if this makes sense.

Not sure if this may cause some dilution or could anger Google in some way.

IMO I am trying to provide easier content to digest for INTL visitors and pick up some more keywords in other languages.

I've done research but it all appears conflicting per usual.

Am I f***** myself here somehow?

Thanks!

Also, Is there a sitemap generator that can create separate sitemaps for each language?
Yoast only does the English version.

 

[Philip J. Fry]

You need human translated content or else the text will read like it was translated with a machine. If you're bilingual or more, you'll know that AI translation is not the same as native speaker written text.

Also, you need to know the langauge at a native speaker level to optimize the on-page SEO. That's because you need to figure out the keyword's search intent to know what the page should be about. It isn't a math optimization equation and if you're not a native speaker, you can be quite off the LSA mark for that language. For example, lets take "bank near me". An article such as "Banks near me... find the closes river bank that you can lounge on this summer! Banks near you are very important to a city's health and a great way to relax during the summer..." Obviously, it is optimized for "banks near me" but is totally off the mark for what the intent is, which is the nearest financial institution.

So, yeah, you bit more than you can chew. Good luck. As someone who ran a site in 13 languages (and is now starting a new multi-linguage site as well), you need an SEO team for each language. No way around it. Or at least an SEO specialist whom you give guidance to in each langauge. Or at least a SEO agency for that langauge. If you don't speak the language, you're SOL. You can't expect Google translated content to be optimize. That's foolish.

 

[voLdie]

@Philip J. Fry

What do you think the move is at this point? Remove it?

If it's not going to anger Google I may just see what happens but want to exercise some caution.

I don't want to piss off Google with a mass de-indexing.

I understand, for sure that these are not great optimized translations but figured due to the amount of content and the quality of the English version I would pick up some increases in traffic here and there.

What structure do you use for organizing your languages out of curiosity?

Slowing down and thinking over what you said.

I should probably pick 2 - 3 additional languages and just hire translators to work through all of the articles.

Hmmm, probably reasonable price-wise for some countries. I just don't know if I have the bandwidth to manage that currently. May give it a go.

 

[Ryuzaki]

I'm of the same opinion as Google, that auto-generated, machine translated content is spam.

 

[voLdie]

I'm of the same opinion as Google, that auto-generated, machine translated content is spam.

Removed them all. Fuck it. If I'm starting to lose sleep about something it ain't worth it lol.

 

[Philip J. Fry]

"It's very good that you got to know it. Good luck with your hobby."

^ Me writing text in German and translating it to English to show you how trash AI translation are to native speakers.

What I meant to say is "it is good that you learned this. Good luck with your project."

 

[voLdie]

I had a European friend read through some articles. He said you can understand it and it's not bad but you can tell it was written by a "machine".

Decided fuck it and while this site is starting to blow up I don't want to be doing YOLO tests with it lol.

Thanks for the help @Philip J. Fry @Ryuzaki