Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Can dynamically translated pages hurt a site?
-
Hi all...looking for some insight pls...i have a site we have worked very hard on to get ranked well and it is doing well in search. The site has about 1000 pages and climbing and has about 50 of those pages in translated pages and are static pages with unique urls. I have had no problems here with duplicate content and that sort of thing and all pages were manually translated so no translation issues. We have been looking at software that can dynamically translate the complete site into a handfull of languages...lets say about 5. My problem here is these pages get produced dynamically and i have concerns that google will take issue with this aswell as the huge sudden influx of new urls....as now we could be looking at and increase of 5000 new urls. (which usually triggers an alarm)
My feeling is that it could be risking the stability of the site that we have worked so hard for and maybe just stick with the already translated static pages.
I am sure the process could be fine but fear a manual inspection and a slap on the wrist for having dynamically created content?? and also just risk a review trigger period.
These days it is hard to know what could get you in "trouble" and my gut says keep it simple and as is and dont shake it up?? Am i being overly concerned? Would love to here from others who have tried similar changes and also those who have not due to similar "fear"
thanks
-
Stumbled upon some additional information and decided to update you...
According to the internationalization FAQ...
Q: <a name="q5"></a>Can I use automated translations?
A: Yes, but they must be blocked from indexing with the “noindex” robots meta tag. We consider automated translations to be auto-generated content, so allowing them to be indexed would be a violation of our Webmaster Guidelines.So if you decide to autotranslate the text, you should use a noindex tag instead of the hreflang tag.
-
Considering they offer that service themselves, it would be hypocritical of them to penalize you for doing it. The hreflang tag would also protect you from having those pages marked as spam since you are telling G "Page a the exact same as page å, just in a different language" - avoiding "duplicate" content
-
thanks Oleg.....if the site was to get reviewed manually would there be any issues that there are thousands of pages with content being created dynamically?
thanks for your time
-
The problem with using a software to translate your content is that it will never be perfect. There will be many grammatical and/or vocabulary errors that would decrease the quality of the content. I'm not sure if Google is able to understand content quality in other languages, but a worse user experience usually leads to worse rankings. Ideal situation, you would have those pages manually translated (but I know it will cost a fortune).
In case you decide to auto translate, be sure to use the rel="alternative" hreflang="x" tag in order to tell Google that you have multiple pages with the same content, except in different languages.
I don't think you should worry about a sudden influx of pages. Ideally, you'd drip feed them in to take advantage of the freshness factor, but you shouldn't be penalized for creating a lot of new pages.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Why does a site that is worse than mine by every objective measure I can find, keep outranking me in search?
I’ve been working on educating myself about SEO all day, again. All-Star Telescope up in Canada. We have a competitor that consistently ranks #1 and I don't get it. Their site is full of duplicate content (straight copy and paste from the manufacturer site). They don't have any meaningful blog or video content to add relevance or value to their site. We have higher page authority, higher domain authority, and they keyword analyzer in moz says that our page is higher quality than the the competitors page. Our site is slow, but theirs is slower. I can’t find a single metric on any tool (ubbersuggest, Moz, ahrefs, semrush) that says Telescopes Canada is a better site, or has a better NexStar 8SE product page (a popular telescope). Here’s the link to Telescope Canada’s page for their Celestron 8SE: https://telescopescanada.ca/products/celestron-nexstar-8se-computerized-telescope-11069?_pos=1&_sid=f0aa91cc2&_ss=r Here’s a link to the Celestron 8SE page from the manufacturer website: https://www.celestron.com/products/nexstar-8se-computerized-telescope?_pos=1&_sid=56abdabd4&_ss=r#description Telescopes Canada has just copied and pasted. There is no original content aside from adding the shipping and return policy to the tab, and having some options for selecting accessories on the page. Here is our page: https://all-startelescope.com/products/celestron-nexstar-8se Our titles are good, our metadata is good (but I don’t think that’s been a serious ranking factor for about ten years). The text is original, it’s relevant, we have healthy internal links to the page. We have invensted in some excellent blog content, we’re adding new products to the website so that we rank for more keywords. All of those things are helping, but I fundamentally don’t understand why Telescopes Canada is #1 almost across the board on every key product in our market. There is something that I’m not seeing here, something that isn't being captured by the tools that I have. Is it simple the fact that they get more traffic? Is that why some people go and buy traffic? Can you see any metric, any tool in your toolbox that indicates why they rank at the top, or even higher than we do for in these search terms specific to that product: Celestron NexStar 8SE
Technical SEO | | nkennett
NexStar 8SE
Celestron NexStar 8SE Canada
NexStar 8SE Canada We've worked with two highly ranked SEO's to try and figure this out, one in Canada, and one in the USA. I haven't seen a confidence inspiring answer from either of them. Posting on a forum is a bit of an act of desperation, I'll continue to work the problem, but it's discouraging to see the leader in my industry look like he's just phoning it in with his website.1 -
Canonical for duplicate pages in ecommerce site and the product out of stock
I’m an SEO for an ecommerce site that sells shoes I have duplicate pages for different colors of the same product (unique URL for each color), Conventionally I have added canonical tags for each page, which direct to a specific product URL My question is what happens when a product which the googlbot is direct to, is out of stock but is still listed in the canonical tag ?
Technical SEO | | shoesonline0 -
Can anyone tell me why some of the top referrers to my site are porn site?
We noticed today that 4 of the top referring sites are actually porn sites. Does anyone know what that is all about? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | thinkcreativegroup1 -
How can I block incoming links from a bad web site ?
Hello all, We got a new client recently who had a warning from Google Webmasters tools for manual soft penalty. I did a lot of search and I found out one particular site that sounds roughly 100k links to one page and has been potentialy a high risk site. I wish to block those links from coming in to my site but their webmaster is nowhere to be seen and I do not want to use the disavow tool. Is there a way I can use code to our htaccess file or any other method? Would appreciate anyone's immediate response. Kind Regards
Technical SEO | | artdivision0 -
Product Pages Outranking Category Pages
Hi, We are noticing an issue where some product pages are outranking our relevant category pages for certain keywords. For a made up example, a "heavy duty widgets" product page might rank for the keyword phrase Heavy Duty Widgets, instead of our Heavy Duty Widgets category page appearing in the SERPs. We've noticed this happening primarily in cases where the name of the product page contains an at least partial match for the desired keyword phrase we want the category page to rank for. However, we've also found isolated cases where the specified keyword points to a completely irrelevent pages instead of the relevant category page. Has anyone encountered a similar issue before, or have any ideas as to what may cause this to happen? Let me know if more clarification of the question is needed. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | ShawnHerrick0 -
Can too many pages hurt crawling and ranking?
Hi, I work for local yellow pages in Belgium, over the last months we introduced a succesfull technique to boost SEO traffic: we have created over 150k of new pages, all targeting specific keywords and all containing unique content, a site architecture to enable google to find these pages through crawling, xml sitemaps, .... All signs (traffic, indexation of xml sitemaps, rankings, ...) are positive. So far so good. We are able to quickly build more unique pages, and I wonder how google will react to this type of "large scale operation": can it hurt crawling and ranking if google notices big volumes of content (unique content)? Please advice
Technical SEO | | TruvoDirectories0 -
Can you 301 redirect a page to an already existing/old page ?
If you delete a page (say a sub department/category page on an ecommerce store) should you 301 redirect its url to the nearest equivalent page still on the site or just delete and forget about it ? Generally should you try and 301 redirect any old pages your deleting if you can find suitable page with similar content to redirect to. Wont G consider it weird if you say a page has moved permenantly to such and such an address if that page/address existed before ? I presume its fine since say in the scenario of consolidating departments on your store you want to redirect the department page your going to delete to the existing pages/department you are consolidating old departments products into ?
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
We have set up 301 redirects for pages from an old domain, but they aren't working and we are having duplicate content problems - Can you help?
We have several old domains. One is http://www.ccisound.com - Our "real" site is http://www.ccisolutions.com The 301 redirect from the old domain to the new domain works. However, the 301-redirects for interior pages, like: http://www.ccisolund.com/StoreFront/category/cd-duplicators do not work. This URL should redirect to http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/cd-duplicators but as you can see it does not. Our IT director supplied me with this code from the HT Access file in hopes that someone can help point us in the right direction and suggest how we might fix the problem: RewriteCond%{HTTP_HOST} ccisound.com$ [NC] RewriteRule^(.*)$ http://www.ccisolutions.com/$1 [R=301,L] Any ideas on why the 301 redirect isn't happening? Thanks all!
Technical SEO | | danatanseo0