Today's question comes from Tim Wible in Buffalo, New York, and Tim wants to know, let's say I want to add multiple languages or countries to mysite com.
Would I be better off including all translations within my domain dot com?
Or would I be better off creating my domain or my domain on my domain?
Dot CA, et cetera.
Well, my domain dot CA is Canada, so you probably don't.
If you're English, you don't need to translate that one.
A unless you really want to add a lot of local color to it.
But if you have, for example, French or German or Dutch or something like that, absolutely.
I would translate that.
I would make sure that I don't auto translate that, make sure that it would read, write to a normal user.
And then, if possible, I would put it on separate domains.
So my domain or my domain NL.
Now, why do we recommend that?
The reasons are that number one, it's a lot easier for a search engine to be able to tell this entire domain is related to this language or this particular country.
The other reason is it's easier for users.
You'd be surprised how well someone will respond a little more if it resonates with them, and they say, hey, this is a local business.
It's not just some translation over on a random com somewhere.
Now, that does cost a little more, and it opens you up to a little more overhead.
It takes a little more time.
But if you're a big enough business where you can afford to get the domains in other countries, I would recommend that if you can't do that, you can always make, for example, a subdomain do domain dot com or Fr domain dot com.
But if you have an easy choice and you can get the full domain in a different country level T or top level domain, I would probably do it that way.
One last point of caution, there's a lot of people who might think, oh, I'll just automatically translate all my content into 40 different languages, and now 40 different language markets can all read what I have to say, and we're going to make clear or making clear right now that our guidelines about auto generated stuff can also apply to autotranslated text. If you're searching in French and you show up on a page and it's been completely autotranslated and it doesn't even read well at all.
And no one has put any kind of human care into proof reading it or making sure that it flows.
That's really a bad experience.
So we would prefer that you may be at a widget that says, translate into this language or something like that and not just auto, translate into a bunch of languages and just throw that content up there.
So those are a few things to bear in mind.
Whenever you're thinking about which domains to go with, you can always use Google Webmaster tools.
If you want to go ahead and specify if you have a dot com, for example, oh, I'm actually related to this particular country, but if you have the top level domain for that country, that's a pretty inescapable signal that this is really relevant to that particular market.