More languages means more visitors
We've been running Google Analytics here on Drupal-translation.com for a while now and have interesting statistics to share.
(Many) more visitors from countries with translations
Drupal-translation.com is translated to German and Spanish. This map shows where our visitors come from.
Do you see the two dark spots in Europe? One is Spain and the other Germany.
In South America, the large dark spot is Argentina (with about 40 million people). We're getting about 5 times more visitors from Argentina than from Brazil (with about 160 million folks).
It's true that most web developers speak English. We've asked Drupal developers in Argentina (where I live) which language they prefer using in Drupal's admin interface. The clear answer is English (most replies are in Spanish). However, they still prefer searching the web and reading pages in their own language.
It's one thing getting used to the admin interface in a different language (even your) and another thing to read long texts.
As we've seen, Drupal developers, although almost all speak fluent English, still prefer to learn in their own language.
A huge tail of search results
Most of our visitors come from Google. Typically, people searching for help while creating multilingual Drupal sites.
People look for all sorts of things. The most popular topics are maintaining menus in multiple languages and content translation.
Drupal adds the language information to the HTML header, telling browsers and search engines, which language each page is written in:
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en" xml:lang="en">
This means that searches will land on pages in the right language. For instance, searching for 'zweisprachige seite drupal' lands on drupal-translation.com/de while searching for 'bilingual drupal sites' leads to drupal-translation.com.
Instead of having a few search terms that drive most of our traffic, we now have almost 50 search terms responsible for 80% of the traffic. And, it's scattered across 3 languages.
Great search engine ranking without a country specific top level domain
Several clients of our translation service insist on serving different language contents from country specific top level domains (TLDs). This is done primarily in order to improve search engine ranking.
We've argued before that country specific TLDs should be used for sites that deliver truly unique regional contents and not for translated contents. For our own Drupal site, we see that we're getting excellent Google search positions by using simple language prefix in the path (URL).
This helps both visitors and search engines understand that the contents are basically the same, just translated to different languages. There's nothing special about translating Drupal sites that we can tell to German visitors, so why do we need a .de domain? A .de domain would imply unique contents that are meant for people in Germany.
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Deutsch
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Comments
My website is about PC Games
My website is about PC Games and would attract many more people from different countries if I could have it in different languages. I don't like automatic translations but I can translate them into 2 different languages myself. The problem is use Wordpress and there is no option like second , third language.
You can use http://wpml.org/
You can use http://wpml.org/ to change WordPress into a multilingual content management system.
Really interesting blog post,
Really interesting blog post, thanks. Not being an SEO myself I can't say I'd ever thought about a lot of these things in terms our of site, but I would agree that the ordering of metadata words and other small changes is vital - indeed it's something to think about outside of SEO in other types of best web hosting.
The great thing about the web is that you can quantify things and check these, albeit not perfectly but you can get some great stats pretty quickly to analyse any change in performance. It would be enlightening (but I imagine nigh on impossible) to see click throughs for normal Google searches in the same way you can for Adwords. The SEO's dream?
PC Games Magazine
My website is about PC Games and would attract many more people from different countries if I could have it in different languages. I don't like automatic translations but I can translate them into 2 different languages myself. The problem is use Wordpress and there is no option like second , third language. Can anyone help?
Multilingual Wordpress
You can use http://wpml.org/ to change WordPress into a multilingual content management system.
This is definitely true. One
This is definitely true.
One of my sites is a children's educational site about a certain animal. I've translated all the content to spanish as well as english, and I get a more or less 50/50 split.
Traffic effectively doubled by adding the information in a second language.
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