Science for SEO: language

November 13, 2008

New Google patent - more personalization

Google publish (another) patent on the 11th November. This one is interesting because it deals with serving up queries in a preferred language. It means that your search is no longer limited to English sources exclusively if you're in the UK or US or somewhere, because you can specify a language you'd prefer results to be in. This doesn't mean all your results are in your chosen language but Google will also serve those as well as your English results. You could also use dialects if you wanted and also dead languages (Latin, Greek...) AND...Klingon.

You might want Italian results although you are French, because you can read both, so why not? It makes things much easier for people who study or who speak several different languages. If you speak 3 languages, you could be missing out on great information available in German or Lao for example. I'd be interested to know how translators feel about this.

The invention dynamically determines the preferred languages and ranks the search results. The system can determine what you preferred and least preferred languages are by evaluating queries, user interface and search result characteristics.

Query terms are not a good way of determining the language preference because for example, proper nouns are for the most part language independent, so "Marlena Shaw" is always going to be the same. It gives no clue as to what language you want your results in.

Also, keyword searches are not complete enough to determine a language preference, because there's no context. Also individual words can be language-independent or language-misleading. The example used in the patent is the "Waldorf Astoria".

Rankings....

These results are going to have to be ranked to favour the results in the preferred language whilst still allowing for the other results to appear. It's done by using a predetermined shifting factor or by adjusting a numerical score assigned to each search result by a weighting factor and resorting the search results.

I hope this happens soon, it would be really interesting to get multiple language results. This is once again, another example of how personalisation is charging towards us at full throttle. Cool.

October 31, 2008

Multilingual SEO

We often forget that English is not the only language online, and that many other nations who speak a multitude of different languages also have seo needs.

According to Internet world stats the top 5 most spoken languages are distributed like so: 29.4% of users are English speakers, 18.9% Chinese, 8.5% Spanish, 6.4% Japanese, 4.7% French.

Translating content directly from English for example, will not be good enough because there are many nuances proper to each language. There may not be enough keywords in a particular language to allow for a full optimisation.

The local culture may not be the same as for English speaking countries, so the copy will need to be adapted to what they're used to, the same style and the right tone.

We sometimes forget but different English speaking countries have different spellings and words for things too, so these also need to be taken into account, although it is essentially the same language.

It is better imho to re-write the entire copy from scratch rather than translate it.

Google is the most used search engine in most countries, but there are also countries who prefer other engines, like Yandex in Russia (45%), and the Chinese like Baidu.

You might want to look into registering the domain in the country that you're targeting, and keep the local extension in the URL. The competitors will be different to those for the English version of the site for example. The link building will also be localised.

Social media is also affected as you'll have to target the sites that people are using in that country. For example in the US Facebook and MySpace dominate. In Brazil it's Orkut, in Russia V Kontakte, Thailand Hi-5...

I suggest using a fluent speaker of the language who is great at content writing, with a really good knowledge of the local culture and SEO.

There's a free ranking tool that will let you know how your site ranks in multiple languages here.