Ever since I started this blog I’ve been making myself this question several times. As you know, I’m from Mexico so my first language is Spanish, but I feel I can manage decently well the english language, although I know it is not perfect.
The idea behind having multilingual websites is to try to get traffic (mainly Google) from people whose main language is not english, so in essense I think this is not a bad idea and from my perspective it gives me an advantage that not many english speaking webmasters have.
I already have some experience with multilingual websites, specifically with only one which is called HispMarketing.com which as you might have noticed it has to do with Internet Business and is in English and Spanish, so let me talk to you from this experience.
What were my results with this website?
So far, the results haven’t been what I had expected and here is why:
1) When I tried to join Kontera, they rejected me because my site was not in english. In reality is not that my site is not in english, the problem seems to be that ad networks tend to prefer very focused websites so they can pefectly match with their target audiences. If you think about it, it makes perfect sense, if you have a bilingual website, in reality you are trying to eat two huge different worlds at the same time, and this is not good for ad networks.
2) I noticed I had trouble about getting indexed properly by Google. I think this has to do with the fact that usually Google uses your index page to crawl your website and then Google goes from there to the rest of the pages. When you have a bilingual website, the index page has information in both languages so I guess Google gets confused because it is seeing content in both languages. In my particular case in HispaMarketing.com, I have an index page that has information in both languages so at the end it is not ranking well neither for the spanish or english words.
So, what I’ve learned from this experience is that it is better to stay as focused as possible in one niche in one language. Even if you pick a very narrow niche like “dog training”, it is a very different niche if you go to the same niche in spanish like “entrenamiento para perros”. What I found is that what determines a niche is the characteristics of the audience and not the nature of the product itself. In essence either “dog training” or “entrenamiento para perros” are the same thing but the audiences are very very different.
When do I recommend having multilingual websites?
I would recommend having a multilingual website if it is kind like a corporate website whose only mission is to promote your brand or company to the world, so in this particular case, you don’t care about ranking well for set of keywords in particular, you just care about branding your company for several languages. It comes to my mind a site like HP.com, where they do have their site in different languages but this site is just about the company and not their products.
I hope this makes sense to you and if you have had similar experiences with multilingual websites please let me know.
UPDATE: HispaMarketing.com is now longer live. This was the blog I had before TechnoBuck.com, and it was made with the platform named “Joomla”. In September 2007, I stopped blogging in HispaMarketing.com and moved all the posts I had written there to TechnoBuck.com that is made with the platform “WordPress”, which is what I recommend if you want to setup a blog.
Héctor Sánchez is a blogger from Ocotlán, Jalisco and he is currently residing in Guadalajara. Héctor is a Public Accountant from Universdidad Panamericana with a Posgrade in Corporate Finance from the same university, and he is currently working as financial analyst for Hewlett Packard. Even though he works in Finance for a living, in his spare time, he is a geek and he likes to build blogs, websites and studies everything related with Internet Marketing and several ways of building businesses online. He is also an active member of Toastmasters, where is the President in turn of his local club, Toastmasters Atlas Chapalita Club.
Sounds like good advice, thank you.