I never really thought about it, but it seems that you can fake PageRanks.  Now why would you want to do that?  I can think of many different reasons but here is one of the most pressing ones.

I am sure that you have heard of people buying up domains and the reselling them for greater value later on down the road.  These people are speculators, always on the look out for potential money makers.  It is actually brilliant but not always a good thing for those who would need the domains later on.

Anyhow, one of the most important factors that domain buyers take into consideration is the current PageRank of the domain.  If you have ever tried buying an existing domain, you would understand that one of the main reasons you would want to do so is that the PR is already decent.  It would save you months of work and money as opposed to starting from scratch.

It makes perfect sense – unless the PR is fake.  Yup, there are ways and means by which people can make the PR look good when in reality, there is no PR.  Since that is not a matter of importance to us – creating fake PR – let’s not dwell on it.  Instead, let us see how we can determine if the PR is legit.

I do not have much experience in this matter but I ran across a Fake PageRank checker tool.  The URL is http://www.seologs.com/pr-check/pagerank.html.  You can try it out yourself.

Do you know of any other way to determine the legitimacy of PR?

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So we’ve taken a look at two points – keyword translation and content translation. I believe these are the two most important considerations for SEO when it comes to multi-lingual sites. However, there are other things that we need to take a look into. They may seem minor to some, but if they are overlooked, they could very well spell disaster for your multi-lingual web sites.

Linking
Anyone who has had even the slightest encounter with SEO principles would know that links are one of the most important things. If you have a multi-lingual site, you simply cannot overlook linking. You have to make sure that you include links – both to and from – your English site to your foreign language site. At the same time, you have to include the links to English on your foreign language site. Otherwise, it would be akin to leaving your foreign language readers disconnected from the rest of the world.

Language options
If your aim is to attract people who speak a language other than English, you would want them to know easily that you are offering the site in their language, right? As such, the options for your foreign language web sites should be prominently shown on the English web site. Ideally, the options should be seen on top of the page – left or right, it’s up to you. The point is that it is easily understandable that you are offering the site in other languages and to point out clearly which languages you have your other sites in.

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In the last post, we had an overview of how SEO is also an important consideration in multi-lingual sites. We looked at some points that could help promote multi-lingual sites. Let us look into these in more detail.

Keyword translation
We all know how keywords are important when it comes to SEO. Just as with English web sites, however, we do not want to overload our pages with keywords. Otherwise, the overall result may seem like gibberish and that is not what we want. Instead, you should focus on getting the most essential keywords and making sure that the translation that you make use of is accurate. What if you cannot find direct translations for keywords? This is entirely possible as there are many English words that do not have exact translations in many languages. The thing to do then would be to find alternative keywords in the target language.

Content translation
Not only do you have to focus on translating keywords but you also have to pay attention to the translation of your site’s entire contents. You can always opt to have automatic translation done but this would not ensure accurate translation. If you’re thinking of saving some money by NOT hiring an expert translator, think about the repercussions of having a badly translated site – it could very well cost you more than paying for a good translator.

Let’s look at the other points in the next post.

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Creating a web site and incorporating SEO principles is a challenge in itself. How much more if you are creating one which deals with different languages? With the idea that you want to reach as many people as you possibly can, it is but logical to try and cater to various languages – at least the major ones. Of course, you will definitely get a lot of traffic from English-speaking people alone but you cannot discount the fact that you can always cater to more if only you offered your web site in other languages.

Moving on to SEO, is there anything different about SEO when working on multi-lingual web sites? The good news is that there isn’t a whole lot of difference. The key SEO principles remain the same – except that you would have to do some of them (especially those regarding keywords) in a different language. Here are some tips that could help you in your quest to put good SEO practices into place when working on a multi-lingual web site.

I have four things to share with you. They are as follow:

-Pay attention to keyword translation
-Pay attention to content translation
-Pay attention to the links in all of your sites (all languages)
-Pay attention to the language options as seen by your users.

They are all pretty much self-explanatory but it would be good to look into some details in the next post.

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