SEO impact of automatically translating by WP Plugin?

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SEO impact of automatically translating by WP Plugin?

SelenaQuintanilla

6:05 pm on Apr 5, 2022 (gmt 0)

Hello Friends,

For a site created with Wordpress, I just "added" 2 other languages <snip> to it with the TranslatePress plugin.
For the moment I am very satisfied with it because it is easy to use and allows me to change the url of the translated pages.

The Objective / Hope is:
- SEO: increase my number of pages on the site & internal links and thus have a better ranking
- Increase Traffic : position myself on new languages <snip> and therefore new visitor traffic

I am right? or did i miss something?

thanks in advance

[edited by: not2easy at 6:23 pm (utc) on Apr 5, 2022]
[edit reason] revoved extraneous characters for readability. [/edit]

not2easy

6:43 pm on Apr 5, 2022 (gmt 0)

Just translating your pages won't do much for SEO. When visiting translated pages, is the navigation still in its original language or is the navigation also translated?

Have you let Google know that you offer your content in other languages? There are various ways to let Google know, Google tells you how to do that: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/crawling/localized-versions

Ideally you should have someone who actually speaks that language take a look and offer suggestions as machine translations can be peculiar.

If you do not already have traffic using the languages you have translated your content to show, it can take time to start seeing any boost. If you have advertising on those pages, is it also shown in the same language? Can you adjust ads to other languages? If Google sees it as only a SEO grab it can backfire. Your pages should be comfortable to visitors who only speak their native language, including image alt tags and captions.

not2easy

7:17 pm on Apr 5, 2022 (gmt 0)

To help in understanding what is involved in international SEO, Moz offers a helpful, visual explanation: https://moz.com/learn/seo/international-seo

SelenaQuintanilla

7:47 pm on Apr 5, 2022 (gmt 0)

THANK YOU! I really appreciated your answer,

The full page/Menu is translated even the meta-description,
the good thing is was able to translate manually the Menu!

For the moment i just translate the website in 2 languages i already speak,
+my ads are not translated so i will work on a solution for this,)

SelenaQuintanilla

3:51 pm on Nov 25, 2022 (gmt 0)

Update,
After translate a website in few European language,
i was thinking should i update it in other language who don�t have a Latin Character?
Like Arab, Chinese, Russian?

To got a website with different character/alphabet is something special?

What do you think about it?
Thank by advance🙏

not2easy

6:04 pm on Nov 25, 2022 (gmt 0)

Look at your page source and the first two lines tell the browser what the page coding is and what language is used on that page. For example:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en-US">

so for the browser to use a different language alphabet, that would need to be adjusted to show the correct

<html lang="xx">

Of course this assumes that the site is not set up to use a charset encoding that cannot display the various characters. If you're set up to use UTF-8

<meta charset="UTF-8" />

and your browser can accept the language you want, it should display OK.

The bad part about using a plugin to translate is that your page might not say the same thing or make sense to a person who speaks the language you want to use. Automated translations technically translate the words, but cannot understand regional variances and local word context. Sometimes they can have a very different meaning when translated without context.

Note that since you mentioned using WordPress, unless your language translation plugin can also translate the pages' meta data it will not be able to work.

Sgt_Kickaxe

3:34 am on Nov 26, 2022 (gmt 0)

Another thing to consider - quality of translation. Get feedback from people who speak the language fluently.

You need to get that feedback because Google is, in user experience reports.

Kendo

5:12 am on Nov 26, 2022 (gmt 0)

Another thing to consider - quality of translation

Does anyone really care? Better still... does a search engine really care?

If visitors are reporting poor grammar because they prefer US instead of British spelling and phraseology, what is the point of picking at machine translation. Similar differences can be found in Spanish for Spain and South America, and in Portuguese for Portugal and South America.

I also see a lot of sites in English that use woeful spelling because English is not the webmaster's first language.

If someone visits your site who doesn't read English, they will be thankful for anything that they can read, even if it doesn't pass a grammar test.

tangor

9:02 am on Nov 26, 2022 (gmt 0)

The OP's original:

The Objective / Hope is:
- SEO: increase my number of pages on the site & internal links and thus have a better ranking
- Increase Traffic : position myself on new languages <snip> and therefore new visitor traffic

G (and most SEs) will view translations as separate, thus not really adding any value (or pages) to the original site (seo).

An increase in overall traffic to the IP is possible, but it will be directed to the languages, not the original site.

When adding translations one should know that the material would/could be valued in different languages/cultures. Not all topics are welcome/accepted in other areas!

SEO impact? Probably little, unless it is not properly handled, and poorly translated might even have a negative drag on the site.