Foriegn language SEO question

Hi Belgamo, translations aren’t treated as duplicate content.

In googles guidelines they say you have to build websites for visitors, not search engines. By translating your pages you are definately helping your visitors to find the right information.

Also, I don’t think there’s a way for google to discover what page is a translation of another with enough accuracy. Just take a look at the poor results from the google translation service.

I agree with Jonitas.

1st. it would be highly unlikely that google would be able to discover the duplicate content.

2nd. Makes no sense to punish you for making the reader’s life easier.

BUT

If google could notice that you are publishing content translated from other websites, you would probably be in trouble.

The act of translating a document creates new content. Search engines are just looking for content plain and simple, if they see the exact same words all strung together on a page, then it is duplicate. If they see a paragraph in English and the same paragraph translated in Spanish on another page that is a completely unique page in the eyes of the search engines.

If you still don’t feel safe, try translating a page using Google’s translation tool and see how it reads in another language, not exactly the way you would translate text and expect it to have proper sentence structure in another language.