Hi,

I am working with a site with a large number of pages. I am talking millions. This site is Belgium. Most of the content is in Dutch and they do well in the Dutch market. However, they do poorly in the French market because about 80% of the "French" pages have Dutch content with French meta tags and navigation.

Since this is the current situation, do you think it is wise to auto translate the content into French? My reasoning is that bad French is probably better than Dutch.

I would love to hear opinions on this subject from you multi lingual SEOs.

Assuming that you don't have the resources / funding to translate the pages probably, then as much as I hate uttering these words: auto translating might be better...

Don't get me wrong here, I strongly believe that translating (automatic or not) is not the way forward. You should look to localise your content. However, mixing languages causes more issues and if nothing else it could harm the performance of your Dutch pages as well due to duplicate content.

Depending on the service/product/information or actual aim of your site, you really might want to look at doing this properly though. Even if it's slow and you only do a 2 pages a day, it would still be much better than nothing!

I express my concerns about auto-translation for a very simple yet important reason: the users. In fact if you manage to get the pages indexed and have them surface in the SERPs they would not do very well because of the poor quality of the content: would you buy anything or label as "reliable" a website with content that doesn't make any sense ??

I'd be very careful before doing anything of this kind - if you don't have the budget to do this now then don't do it at all, you might ruin your reputation now and for a long time to come - think about that ...

__________________

Sante J. Achille
Search Engines & Web Marketing Consultant
skype: rifardo

I completely agree with that. Personally, I'd rather not target a language at all vs. doing it halfway in between. So I'd not have the French pages there at all unless a full localisation could be done.

But I get the idea that this is not an option for the OP.