For B2B marketers looking to target companies in different countries, producing news content marketing material in multiple languages can be difficult. According to Google’s Matt Cutts, the method with which content is translated from one language to another is vital to its SEO value.
Creating content in the language of a primary audience provides a good starting point for foreign language content. However, for a truly effective content marketing campaign across languages, employing content writers in each language is vital.
Using an automated translator tool produces rough content that can register as duplicate content, which is a negative signal for search algorithms, Cutts said. Translating content manually will produce original content that has the same value as all other articles.
“If you’ve just taken the English copy from your website and thrown it into Google Translate and done nothing more than auto-translate it into a bunch of different languages, that can be considered spamming,” Cutts said in a recent Webmaster Help video.
“It hasn’t had a human’s eyes looking at it, figuring out what the idioms are and polishing it. So I would recommend that if you have presences in three countries, have good content in those three countries,” he continued.
Employing foreign content writers can be difficult for businesses, but it’s critical to the success of a bilingual content marketing campaign.
Duplicate content can result in a website being removed entirely from Google SERPs, Brafton has reported. While Google concedes that it is rarely done maliciously, the frequency with which spammers use the tactic to boost cached pages has led Google’s search team to be more aggressive in stamping out duplicate content.
