Please say which of the following languages you believe is most difficult to optimise for successfully - bearing in mind that there may be more competition for Spanish and more lexical difficulty with Japanese?

Hello Andy. I'm a newbie here and I just wanted to post my vote! I'm by no means an expert, it's just that the topic really interests me as I'm trying to learn SEO myself.

I guess the reason why I chose Spanish is because of the different dialects that we have. In English, for example, there's American English, then there's London or UK english, and then there's Australian. In Spanish however, there are so many different dialects. I looked it up in Wikipedia and found about more than 70 dialects.

Colombian Spanish is different than spanish from Mexico or Spain. It's just that there's lots of different ways to spell a certain word, or put different accents on certain words.

So its difficult to optimize a site for the Spanish speaking crowd when someone from Peru might looks for a word that's spelled differently, or that might not even exists, in the Dominican Republic.

Rohen, I understand your comment and have some of my own:

Although there are many dialects in spanish the most important thing is to consider what will be searched. I only know traditional spanish, but I always try to limit accent use on my site because search engine users aren't usually searching with accents. Musica for instance is a much more searched term than Música. I think its an interesting problem and one that google needs to adress; web developers shouldn't be penalized for using the correct grammatical structure but sometimes that's the case.
Otherwise its kind of just a game of give and take. Hope this helped

Your right actually. I never use accents on my searches. Google is still able to find the results with or without accents.

I took it a step further and did a quick test using a Google search on both words:

Musica & Música

Musica: Has 233,000,000
Música: Has 235,000,000

Then I used another word, comuniacion & comunicación.

Comunicacion: Has 122,000,000
Comunicación: Has 127,000,000

Now I tried it with the "ñ."

Ninera:1,090,000
Niñera: 1,060,000

So based on this, if we use accents there will be more results, since there are actually people out there who create web sites using accents. Does that sound right? I don't get the deal with the "ñ." There are more results with using "ñ." I wonder why that is?

Hi Rohen and jkid20 - what you've hit upon there is that Google 'normalises' accents that have an impact on meaning and ignores those that don't. This is a very general rule and I have seen the normalisation turned off and back-on.

However, I'm not sure that that means Spanish qualifies as a difficult language to optimise for? Surely that means Spanish is easy as there are relatively few accents and Google is correcting anyway? Now as for French with it's 5 or 6 accents? Or Russian with its word declensions..... I have to say I'd rate Spanish one of the EASIER language to work with

I am in the middle. I think that what rohen and jkid20 mean is that trying to target the whole spanish speaking community can be tricky since there are many different dialects and what it works for mexican spanish it doesn't for colombian. The french speaker community is not as spread out as the spanish one and copywriting wise there are less cultural nuances to take into account.

Having said that, it has to be admitted that this is not a proper SEO issue but a usability concern in order to convert efficiently or a matter of linguistic localisation.

I would say that chinese is quite a complex language to optimise for as well as russian.

I've voted for japanese as there are three different ideogram sets to work with, but I don't really know.

Spanish would be difficult if you were to address more than one country on a general subject, and most of those have a local domain to get to the local market. And besides the ñ, with not all keyboards having it, there's not much difference with english in the way you optimised.

I went for Russian. And not just because of language itself, but because of the competition they have there. When smart people share experience and help each other they can be very competitive in such modern industries as SEO.

Hi,
This is major for search engines if you have non english language so google and yahoo etc has problem to read your pages so try to make your pages in english and also their description and keywords.


Thank you,
Regards,
Pakistan Boy,
The Best Link Directory | 1 Pakistan Gifts

I’ve been optimizing portals on English and Spanish only.
So, I can’t really know how difficult the other’s languages are.

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