8 replies to this topic

[snidely]

Hi Everyone,

I hope I picked the right forum to ask these two questions

1-I have a client who deals exclusively with international (relative to the US/Canada) visitors/clients and I wondered whether optimizing the page for english only keyphrases was the way to go.

If a searcher in another country types in a search phrase in their own language (not English)-will they see english listings? I know when I tried a search in Google, Russian sites came up (and this topic had nothing to do with Russia)-which I hadn't seen before. Does anyone know if there is a 'general' answer to this? If it depends on the engines, would the top ones give you english results even if you typed the keyphrase in Swahili for example?

2-Can anyone tell me where to look for stats on which engines are most popular in certain countries? For example-which is the most popular engine in Argentina? China? etc.

Thanks for a great forum-I learn something new every day here!

Cheers

Snidely

[Jill]

If you search using swahili, you will pull up pages written in Swahili. Search using french keywords, you should get pages written in French.

Jill

[qwerty]

It looks to me like you need different versions of your pages for different languages. Give people a choice of what language they want to use at the home page, and have the content in the language they chose from that point on.

Some of the search engines, like Google and AltaVista have online translation tools, but I've never seen any reason to believe that they use them themselves in order to rank pages for equivalent words in languages other than the one they're written in. And when you think about it, that makes sense. If I only speak German, and I do a search in German, having the search engine bring up pages in English that are optimized for the English equivalent of my German search isn't going to do me any good.

[Irony]

Yandex is the most popular thing in Russia.

http://www.yandex.ru

I do not know why, by the way. I hate it.

Rambler and Aport are the other two.

[snidely]

Thanks Jill and Qwerty,

I am really glad I asked, I was being too english centric!!!

It sounds like having the main page provide different language options is the way to go-I gather that this way the different language pages will be picked up by the engines so that people will be able to find their own language page. This should be fine with the engines, right? I don't see this as spamming (only accomodating people)-will they?

Thanks again,

Snidely

[snidely]

Yandex is the most popular thing in Russia.
Rambler and Aport are the other two.

Hi Irony,

Thanks so much for that info I need to get a more international view on things, which I am looking forward to!

Thanks again

Snidely

[qwerty]

It's definitely not spamming. It's usability -- recognizing and providing for the needs of your audience. The search engines have no problem with something like that.

[snidely]

Thanks Qwerty,

Good to hear, I would hope that would be the case. Now I need to find stats about engines in different countries-I have found a link for ones in Europe which seems to be okay:
<http://www.netmechan...promo_no15.htm>
Irony gave me some for Russia, now I am looking for ones that deal with Asia and South America...I am learning a lot with this topic!

Thanks for your help

Snidely

[qwerty]

You should find this article by Danny Sullivan useful. It's more than a year old, though.