Question

Topic: SEO/SEM

Se Rankings Problem With Language Websites

Posted by Anonymous on 5/10/2006 at 12:03 PM ET 500 Points
I'm having trouble deciding what to do with some of our language sites. Our main website is (nearly) duplicated into 3 languages: Spanish, French and German. I've been using web position to track the rankings of each language site, and for certain key terms, the language sites do not rank at all.

I.E. Main Site www.digi.com
key term: serial ethernet
language site www.digi.com/es
term rank for English site, 2nd page
term rank for Spanish site, not in top 30

My main question is, should I continue to try and optimize the language site for the key term on Spanish engines, or just let the main english site gather the rankings and hope Spanish speakers then go to /es?

Any advice is appreciated!
-Elizabeth
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RESPONSES

  • Posted by Pepper Blue on 5/10/2006 at 12:20 PM Accepted
    Elizabeth,

    Interesting question.

    It would seem to me that since there are 504,000 results for "serial ethernet" returned in Spanish and 29,600,000 in English that your chances of getting ranked higher in Spanish are better than English, so continuing to optimize in Spanish seems like a wise decision.

    As with all things organic SEO, remember, it takes time to see the changes.

    Of course, there are questions such as what part of the Spanish speaking world is your target market? Does it validate the resources you are putting into it, or is this better spent tweaking the English site? Does your Spanish speaking audience also include English searches when they are searching?
  • Posted by ReadCopy on 5/10/2006 at 12:54 PM Accepted
    If you are serious about providing language sites, then I would always recommend getting a natural language domain (i.e. www.digi.es) I notice that this domain is for sale too. If you go down this path, ensure that the site is actually hosted in that country too.

    I worked with a Spanish client, who couldn't understand why I couldn't get her Number 1 position for "páginas de España", but it was simply that that site was hosted in Hong Kong!
  • Posted by ReadCopy on 5/10/2006 at 1:35 PM Accepted
    You may have this problem with search engines for a while, one thing I have found workinga round Europe is that the surfers seem to be more patriotic, and will usually prefer to search for natural language sites or locally hosted ones.

    It's probably worth focussing some effort on your SEO for the alias pages, that should improve the ranking for the keywords.

    Good Luck
  • Posted by ReadCopy on 5/10/2006 at 3:42 PM Member
    Just had a brief look at your alias sites and they definately need some SEO work, the PageRank is good, but the rest of it needs some work in order to get a good rank.

    Visit my site for a free SEO report on a single keyword/phrase to see how we can improve your rank.
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