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I have been working with wordpress sites for some time for a construction company. I am now in the process of creating 3-4 niche sites to generate income from ad-sense and affiliate marketing.

I have been reading alot about translating wordpress sites into different languages. Seems like there could be a huge upside potential to take a niche site with 5-10k monthly visitors targeting visitors all over the world?

When I researched the pluggins, some say they will will give you viewer the option of viewing the site in a particular language. Seems like it will not rank organically in the foreign country with this method?

The other option is the multisite version.

1. So I am wondering, is this a doable strategy?

2. Anybody have experience that can help me out here? I am ok with making investments as far as multiple domains and hosting if thats what needs to be done to effectively target searches in other countries.

Please help! Thanks!
#language #translation
  • Profile picture of the author Michael Westgate
    If I am understanding you correctly, your first option would be a single website, set up in English (English URLs with an English sitemap file). The website would have a plugin, perhaps in the header, that would allow the user to change language. This would keep the URL the same, but perhaps use some kind of internal dictionary lookup to translate the text on screen? Would it also change the meta data (and therefore the text that appears in Google when customers are searching)? This option would work however it does have some limitations as you have alluded to. Should you continue down this route then it would be worth listing all alternative language URLs in your sitemap.xml file so that search engines are aware of the various flavours of your website. This may not be possible with the plugin, ie, customers may have to open the page in English and then translate to a different language.

    www.website.com/sales?language=English
    www.website.com/sales?language=French

    The option that I have most experience with is effectively having multiple websites; one for each language.
    - Each website can have its own structure (great when things don't map correctly between languages)
    - Each website can have its own design (right to left and left to right languages for example)

    www.website.com/sales
    www.website.fr/sales

    On a technical note, I use Umbraco, and that allows me to have one website with as many sub domains as needed (one for each language).

    en-gb.website.com/sales
    fr-fr.website.com/ventes

    I hope that helps. Do you have a specific plugin in mind? Perhaps any further questions?
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