How should I handle localized content?

Hi Matt. Let's say I want to add multiple languages/countries to mysite.com. Would I be better off including all translations within mydomain.com, or would I be better off creating mydomain.fr , mydomain.nl , mydomain.ca , etc...? Tim Weibel, Buffalo, NY

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• Category

  Science & Technology

[FreeAdsTime]

Does location of your server matter in terms of search engine ranking? We have servers in Canada and it seems we get better ranking in Canada. However our number one focus is to get traffic from US and then other countries.

[saurik]

It isn't just about price: there are often policies that restrict the ability to purchase domain names from other countries to people who reside in the country.

[agapitoflores001]

This is really informative. Thanks Google.

[Lingoport]

As the video points out, the trouble with "localizing" to an outside locale without proper translation is that it isn't actually localized to that specific locale; the site still comes off as, say, an American site, no matter what the language it is read in. The best localization is done when there is seemingly no way to determine the origin of the site just by looking at it. If you're going to localize, might as well jump in with both feet.

[Jeroen Sijbom]

I have the same question. Does anybody have the answer? Is it useful to have an different TLD with only about 5% different content?

[Ani Lopez]

Spanish is official language in 21 countries but all are "different" spanish with different words for same concepts, example, English: "wholesale", Castillian (spain): "venta al por mayor", Argentinian: "venta mayorista", Mexican: "mayoreo". The solution is language localization

[MrTVTL]

Toronto-based correction on the .ca thing...there are certain words that are spelled differently (e.g. coloUr, flavoUr) because they're based on British English.

Localized content could also refer to the differences in marketing between Canada and the US. For example, there used to be a law in place (and may still exist) where Canadian marketers couldn't name a competitor in their ads, so they always referred to the competitor as "the other leading brand" or "another leading brand".

[Rob Abdul]

Thank you Matt as always!  Than you Tim for asking such an interesting question! It is super to get clarification like this.

[tarrakis]

I totally agree.

It's like having mydomain . com / blog versus blog . mydomain . com

The first one will benefit from the domain's relevance. The second won't. However, if you can get the second to acquire it's own relevancy, you can link to your main domain, "sending" relevance.

In this case, if your main domain is already relevant and has PR, I would go with:

mydomain . com / fr

mydomain . com / es

[Durant Imboden]

I'm glad to hear that using an autotranslate widget (such as the "Select Language" tool supplied by Google Translate) won't set off any spam alarms at Google. On an niche editorial site like ours, it isn't practical to spend millions of dollars to translate 6,000 or 7,000 pages of text into several dozen languages, but it seems polite to offer machine translation as an option for readers from non-English-speaking countries.