SEO: Multilingual pages with redirects -- do they work?

G'day

I recently came across the web site mult1l1ngualmarketer.com (munged 1
= i) on which the company makes a few interesting claims. Once you've
read through the sales pitch, the basic assumption and technique is
this:

Assumption: Users using regional or localised search engines can often
understand English even though they don't do their searches in English.
For this reason one should have the non-English keywords on the page
even if the actual content is in English.

Technique: Have your site machine translated, submit the non-English
pages to regional search engines, and put redirects on the non-English
pages to the real English pages.

The idea is that machine translation is cheap or even free, and the
translations needn't be good or even intelligible, because users will
be redirected to the English pages.

What are your comments? Can this work? Do search engines still
penalise heavily for redirects? Won't users be put off by the redirect
(if it is a delayed redirect or a non-transparent redirect)?

I always advise people to have the entire site or at least the
informational pages translated into several languages, for both SEO and
target market increase purposes, but these translations are usually
human translations. Having translated versions also increases your
odds of getting listed in the ODP, this is common knowledge in SEO
circles. But does this MT+redirect method have any merit?

Thanks!
Leuce aka voetleuce

On 23 Jun 2005, Throw wrote:

I recently came across the web site mult1l1ngualmarketer.com (munged 1
= i)

What? What? Do we even munge web addresses?

on which the company makes a few interesting claims.

Interest lost.

--
Everybody expects the German Inquisition.

in comp.infosystems.www.authoring.site-design, Throw wrote:

G'day

I recently came across the web site mult1l1ngualmarketer.com

(munged 1 = i)

On what purpose? I kind of proves you clueless...

Assumption: Users using regional or localised search engines can often
understand English even though they don't do their searches in English.
For this reason one should have the non-English keywords on the page
even if the actual content is in English.

Bullshit. They first search for pages in their own language, because they
understand it better. They will use english for search, if they don't
find content in right language. In first round, they ignore results in
english.

Technique: Have your site machine translated, submit the non-English
pages to regional search engines, and put redirects on the non-English
pages to the real English pages.

I sure as hell would consider it as as extremily rude.

What are your comments? Can this work? Do search engines still
penalise heavily for redirects? Won't users be put off by the redirect
(if it is a delayed redirect or a non-transparent redirect)?

If it will be used a lot, it will make it impossible to find anything in
any other language as English. Do that, and I sure as hell will report
every occasion I see to google myself.

If you and bunch of other clueless start to do that, search engines will
quickly learn to kick those pages out. Or people searching other languges
stop using those SEs.

I always advise people to have the entire site or at least the
informational pages translated into several languages, for both SEO and
target market increase purposes, but these translations are usually
human translations.

So they actually work. Totally different thing.

Having translated versions also increases your
odds of getting listed in the ODP, this is common knowledge in SEO
circles.

Possible, but those machine translated versions could work as
opposite, if noticed. Anyway, I think that ODP is not that important
anymore, google must have noticed it.

But does this MT+redirect method have any merit?

It is bullshit. People that make their "SEO" not considering users are
only little better that spammers. This approach has potential to make it
impossible to search anything in other language as english. And of course
user don't find what he is looking (cheap/free machine translation won't
produce anything usefull, so it also wont be found when searching
something useful)

And if SE snips stuff that seems to relevent from your "translated" page,
user easily sees it is mumbo jumo language, and may skip you also later
when searching same in english.

--
Lauri Raittila <http://www.iki.fi/lr> <http://www.iki.fi/zwak/fonts>
Utrecht, NL.
Support me, buy Opera:
https://secure.bmtmicro.com/opera/bu...tml?AID=882173

Lauri Raittila wrote:

In comp.infosystems.www.authoring.site-design, Throw
wrote:

I recently came across the web site
mult1l1ngualmarketer.com
(munged 1 = i)

On what purpose? I kind of proves you clueless...

Damned if I do, damned if I don't. Had I not munged it, someone would
have piped up and accused me of promoting that site. :-)

Assumption: Users using regional or localised search
engines can often understand English even though they
don't do their searches in English. For this reason one
should have the non-English keywords on the page
even if the actual content is in English.

Bullshit. They first search for pages in their own
language, because they understand it better. They will
use English for search, if they don't find content in
right language. In first round, they ignore results in
English.

So you agree after all... that they're likely to visit a site if that
site appears in the search engine listing to be in their own language?

Anyway, I think that ODP is not that important
anymore, google must have noticed it.

Could you elaborate, please? Has it been noticed on SEO forums that
Google is now putting less weight on ODP listed sites?