Zeph Snapp will be speaking on “International SEO” at SearchFest 2015 which will take place Friday, February 27, 2015 in Portland Oregon. For more information or to purchase tickets, please click here.
1) Please give us your background and tell us what you do for a living.
Well, as I mentioned last year, I have dual citizenship in Mexico and the US. My parents are both from the US, and as a result many people are surprised with my fluent Spanish. In fact, while I didn’t think it was a big deal, this can sometimes cause confusion.
I run Altura Interactive, and simply put, we do Digital Marketing, in Spanish. Since last Searchfest, I was fortunate enough to have been chosen to speak at both SMX Advanced and Mozcon about the work that my company has been doing, helping international companies reach Spanish speakers all over the world.
2) What’s the state of Panda / Penguin in the Non-English SERPS and will it catch up to the English language SERPS?
The answer, as usual, is it depends. The worst kept secret when it comes to Google is that most of its results in other languages aren’t great. They are improving, but Hummingbird has also thrown a bit of a wrench into things as well. The sad truth is that the vast majority of Google’s revenue comes from English, and as long as that is true, other languages are going to receive less resources and attention.
As far as Panda & Penguin are concerned, you still see websites (especially big brands) getting away with thin content in verticals where there is less competition, and you can still rank websites with less than stellar links.
But Google has been investing in growing their worldwide spam team, and I’ve seen websites getting penalized for crossing the line.
I personally doubt that we will see non-English versions of Google catch up in the near future, especially since there is very little incentive for improvement (since there is no worthwhile local competitor).
3) Many of us are dependent on translated content for Non-English websites. How does the quality of translation impact ranking?
The answer to this is very simple and very complicated at the same time. First off, using machine translated content, (even the Google Translate WordPress plugin) will get you content de-indexed. This is because machine translation provides a poor experience for users, since it is rarely contextual, and doesn’t add anything to the website.
A poor translation, or one that is grammatically correct, but doesn’t provide good information will get indexed, and depending on competition and query intent, can rank for terms, no matter the language. However, we also know that search engines take click-through rate, and being the last click into account as part of their algorithms. So if your metadata doesn’t provide a compelling call to action, and the information on the page doesn’t provide the information the user needs, then it is likely that your site will not rank for long.
One additional note on this: We did a SERP study for 66 keywords across 10 Spanish speaking markets last year to try and understand if using country specific ccTLD’s was an advantageous strategy. What we found was that almost as many “incorrect” ccTLD’s (a site from Venezuela ranking in Mexico, for example) ranked as “incorrect”, and that gTLD’s dominated the SERP’s in Latin America. So if you are going to target Latin America & Spain, you don’t necessarily have to run out and purchase 10 new country specific domains. subfolders and subdomains can rank just as well!
Todd Mintz knows PPC…knows Social Media…knows SEO…knows Blogging…knows Domaining…and knows them all real well. He runs growth marketing for )and is also a Director & Founding Member of SEMpdx: Portland, Oregon’s Search Engine Marketing Association, and he can be found here on Twitter and Facebook.