Hi,

I just asked myself a question: If you have a very authoritative site ranking in the English language SERPs, what will creating a German (or another language) version of that website (on the same domain, of course) do?

Can you usually expect to pull some decent traffic doing just that (as overall domain/site authority seems so important in G these days..) or do you usually need links in that language, pointing to that page (the foreign language version) if you want to stand any chance of ranking for something somewhat competitive?

My guess would be getting a couple of quality links to such a page (in the right language, etc.) should help it rank (but that the overall domain authority still makes sure you dont need as many links to the foreign language version), whereas one that doesnt have any links like that to such a page only has a shot with uncompetitive long-tail terms..?

But then again, Im only guessing as I havent translated a website before

Your struggle will be more related to ranking in the local results when using the "pages from Germany" option. Since you are not using a local ccTLD- you will indeed need quality, local links (from local sites) to make up for this.

You can expect reasonable results, assuming your compatibility is fine, in 'web' and 'german' results - but the 'pages from Germany' is where your challenge is with this approach.

So link building (from local sites) towards your German pages, including quality deep links, would be a good start.

I agree with Peter, especially now that Google is defaulting over to the local language set of pages. I would say that you will be able to rank decently for those keywords where the local component is not as important. But then, if you are an authority in a language, chances are you will do well also in other languages; what I think is important when you go to multi-lingual is not so much the translation but the localization which is a whole different story

__________________

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

Thanks for the quick replies guys!