GTS Blog

Do you get a lot of unsolicited emails asking you to do link exchange? If you are the webmaster of a high traffic website, chances are you get several of them a day. I know that we get dozens of them each month. How should you respond to them? Does your company have a link exchange program? Is it an effective form of SEO? Will it get you higher search engine rankings?

I am not sure that there is a definitive answer to this, but here are some of my own thoughts on this topic.

Fact 1: Many of the successful companies that rely on the Internet for sales and that rank high in search engines engage in link exchange in one form or the other. Since 1 + 1 = 2, this would indicate that link exchange is good.

Fact 2: Google frowns on link exchange programs. In fact, Google advises against excessive link exchange campaigns as you can see on the Google Webmaster blog.

. . . some webmasters engage in link exchange schemes and build partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. This is in violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and can negatively impact your site’s ranking in search results.

Are you confused? So am I! If Google advises against link exchange, then why are so many companies doing it? The answer, in my opinion, is that it is indeed possible to build a winning link exchange program. But as with many of the rewarding things in life, it requires a lot of hard work and intelligent planning. But most importantly, building a good reciprocal link program costs considerable money. Which means that if you are not willing/able to spend the money, then link exchange may not be an effective form of SEO for your website. continue reading…

Let me start by saying that I am not the world’s foremost SEO expert. Far from it. But since I launched our first website in 2003 (www.global-translation-services.com) I have learned a thing or two about SEO. And our updated website (www.gts-translation.com) has top ten positions in dozens of keywords. Having said that, the best SEO advice I can give you is: DO IT YOURSELF! 99% of the people that label themselves ‘SEO experts’ are incompetent, liars or both. I learned that the hard way when I first started out after paying a lot of money to SEO companies. If you are a webmaster, then do your own SEO. And if you own or manage your company’s website, develop and nurture an internal SEO operation and be wary when your webmaster asks to approve budgets to external SEO companies.

There are numerous reasons for keeping your SEO in-house:

• All of the search engines publish a wealth of information on how to promote and SEO your website; nobody has any private information that you yourself can’t access.
• Every industry/market requires a different SEO strategy and a different knowledge base. External SEO companies may not make a serious effort to learn the specifics of your own industry.

Here are other things that we have done at GTS which I recommend:

Content is king. Everyone knows that but just like a basketball coach, you have to keep teaching the basics. Create good content, as many pages as you can. See if you can develop a web gadget, an online application or a good code snippet. Embed a link back to your website into the gadget if possible.

Create effective internal links. Once you have some high ranking web pages, create links on them to other pages on your site.

Purchase one-way inbound links from leading directories and resources in your own industry. Find out where the top ranking companies are getting links (do a Google ‘link:www.your-competitors-website.com) so you can get new ideas on where to purchase links.

Start blogging. If your company does not have one, start a blog. If your company already has a blog, then start a new one. Use the blogs to publish new content about your company as frequently as possible.

Update your website content frequently. Search engines like pages that get updated and will crawl your website more often when you update your content.

GTS has released a free WordPress plugin for multilingual blog publishing: the GTS Translation plugin. If you have a WordPress blog, you can download and install the plugin from within your WordPress Admin panel. More about the GTS Translation plugin from the WordPress website.

Background

Since the late 1990s, blogging has become one of the most widely used forms of online communication. There are over 100 Million blogs as of 2010, and the number is growing rapidly due to the rising popularity of social networking and blogging platforms such as WordPress and Blogger.

99% of blog content is not being translated into other languages. Unlike corporate websites, which are translated into other languages for business purposes, most bloggers lack the resources to translate their content. Moreover, blogs are much more dynamic than websites; many blogs are updated daily or even several times a day. Maintaining an active blog in multiple languages provides several technical and administrative challenges.

What’s so special about our solution?

There are dozens of plugins available for all of the popular blogging platforms.  Nearly all of the solutions use Google Translate. So what’s special about our plugin? Well a few things:
continue reading…

Google recently published a blog post about a new technique for websites that use machine translation for templates but not for the page content. Read it here.

In a recent GTS blog post, I wrote that Google is discouraging people from using Google Translate to create new language versions of a website for SEO purposes. Google even went as far as hinting that it would ban sites that made extensive use of raw, unedited MT.

Some people are using Google Translate (and other MT applications) to translate their website template into other languages while leaving the content untouched. In this manner, the keywords, footer links and other items important to SEO are translated into other languages, promoting the website in other countries. But this practice brings about another problem: duplicate content. Google and other search engines don’t like duplicate content and tend to demote such website pages in the SERP rankings. Now, it appears that Google has proposed a solution to this problem, allowing webmasters to use MT for localization of templates without downgrading the ranking of the localized website pages.

Does your website have a lot of machine translated (MT) content? Did you translate a lot of content with Google Translate, the Microsoft Translator or another MT tool? Well if you did, then Google may remove your website from their index entirely. At least that’s what John Mu, a Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google wrote on the Webmaster Central Help forum yesterday.

“In general, when we determine that a page contains only auto-generated content, we may remove it from our index. If we determine that the largest part of a site consists of auto-generated content (such as when it’s automatically translated and crawled & indexed like that for several languages), then we may opt to remove the whole site from the index. This may sound a bit harsh, but auto-generated content that is created for search engines is a really bad idea and a waste of our resources.”

When you put a translation widget into your website, the translation is generated on-the-fly and is not cached anywhere. So Google does not index that content. And while putting in a translation widget may improve the website stickiness, it will not get you any search engine traffic or improve your SERP ranking for foreign language keywords. So some website owners translate their content into other languages with a MT tool as a cheap way to get out more content, more internal links and more traffic. Google’s John Mu advises against this practice as you can all plainly see.

I agree with Mr. Mu on at least one issue. Putting out garbage translations will not help your company project a professional image. And it will probably not bring in much international business.

But from a pure SEO standpoint, I am not sure how strongly Google enforces the rule that Mr. Mu points out. As part of the ongoing product development efforts at GTS, we created a few sites with 100% MT-generated content. Not only did Google not ban these sites, it still shows those website pages on its SERPs one year after the test websites were launched. Used judiciously, creating language versions of your content with MT may get you some positive results. What Mr. Mu is saying IMO is “don’t overdo it.” That is probably good practice.

Do you have any experiences with using MT for SEO? Please share it with us.