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Today's question comes from Tim Weibel in
Buffalo, New York.
And Tim wants to know: let's say I want to add multiple
languages or countries to mysite.com.
Would I be better off including all translations
within mydomain.com, or would I be better off creating
mydomain.fr, mydomain.nl, mydomain.ca, et cetera?
Well, mydomain.ca is Canada, so if you're English you don't
need to translate that one, eh, unless you really want to
add a lot of local color to it.
But if you have, for example, French, or German, or Dutch,
or something like that, absolutely.
I would translate that.
I would make sure I don't auto-translate that, make sure
that it would read right to a normal user.
And then, if possible, I would put it on separate domains.
So mydomain.fr, mydomain.nl.
Now, why do we recommend that?
The reasons are that, number one, it's a lot easier for
search engines to be able to tell this entire domain is
related to this language or this particular country.
The other reason is it's easier for users.
You'd be surprised how well someone will respond a little
more if it resonates with them.
And they say hey this is a local business.
It's not just some translation over on
a random.com somewhere.
Now that does cost a little more, and it opens you up to a
little more overhead.
It takes a little more time.
But if you're a big enough business where you can afford
to get the domains in other countries, I
would recommend that.
If you can't do that, you can always make,
for example, a subdomain.
De.domain.com, or fr.domain.com.
But if you have an easy choice and you can get the full
domain in a different country level TLD, or top level
domain, I would probably do it that way.
One last point of caution.
There's a lot of people who might think, oh I'll just
automatically translate all my content into 40 different
languages, and now 40 different language markets can
all read what I have to say.
And we're going to make clear-- or I'm making clear
right now-- that our guidelines about
auto-generated stuff can also apply to auto-translated text.
If you're searching in French and you show up on a page and
it's been completely auto-translated, and it
doesn't even read well at all and no one has put any kind of
human care into proofreading it or making sure that it
flows, that's really a bad experience.
So we would prefer that you maybe add a widget that says
translate into this language, or something like that.
And not just auto-translate into a bunch of languages and
just throw that content up there.
So those are a few things to bear in mind whenever you're
thinking about which domains to go with.
You can always use Google Webmaster Tools if you want to
go ahead and specify if you have a dot-com.
For example, oh, I'm actually related to
this particular country.
But if you have the top level domain for that country,
that's a pretty inescapable signal that this is really
relevant to that particular market.