Will Google Chrome Auto-translate Change SEO?

Google isn’t doing too badly at taking over the internet. In terms of search they already dominate and the launch of Google Buzz shows they’re keen to crack social media too. But, not content with ruling search and taking on the social media giants, they’re set on dominating the world of browsers too. It’s going well: in the past year alone their browser, Google Chrome, has picked up a respectable 5% market share.

Still, companies like Google don’t rest on their laurels and they’re always making tweaks to make their products that little bit better. And so came the recent announcement that Auto-translation would soon be incorporated into the Chrome browser. This means the browser will detect the language of a website and translate it should it be written in a different language from the user’s default.

No sooner had Google proudly announced their intentions to make information online ‘universally accessible in and easy, frictionless way’ then SEOers the world over were realising the potential for international sites to take advantage of the service.

In terms of SEO, international sites stand to gain enormously from the move. Now websites can be read by speakers of all 56 of the languages supported by Google Translate, meaning that the potential audience of such sites just grew, dramatically.

There’s one flaw however. Google Chrome requires a user to land on a foreign language page before it offers to translate it. This means that although a website might be comprehensible to more people, they still have to stumble across it first. More often than not they’ll find it in a search engine.

That means SEOers have a new dilemma: how to optimise their websites in other languages.
There is really no simple solution. Commentators have been blogging about the potential for altering meta tags to include foreign language key words. But there’s hardly a great deal of space there. Other commentators state that including some foreign language keywords on the site will suffice to have a foreign language search engine locate the site.

Fair enough, sounds good, but how are we going to insert foreign language keywords without creating a generally spammy appearance and reducing user satisfaction for readers? And it’s never advisable to key word stuff a site in any language using hidden text.

Another potential glitch is that Google doesn’t seem to be giving sites any say in whether or not they even want to be translated. As a result, traffic might increase, but where’s the benefit to a British e-commerce site getting lots of visits from China if the visitors can’t make a purchase anyway?

It’s a complicated dilemma that SEOers are going to have to think hard to overcome. In the meantime there’s always the option of doing it the old fashioned way: having several language versions of the same site. Some have argued that this produces duplicate content in Google’s eyes but as a linguist I simply don’t believe that. I’ve seen the quality of the translation produced by Google Translate (even Google themselves admit that the translations never turn out as well as they would if a human translated them) and any other online translator you care to name and I’m not convinced that a computer’s translation would be accurate enough to produce anything near duplicate content.

Will Google Chrome’s Auto-Translate change SEO? Perhaps, it certainly has some potential to boost traffic by giving foreign readers the gist of a site. For me though,  ( and call me a luddite if you will) for the near future anyway, I’ll be favouring foreign language sites translated by people, with better language quality for a better user experience and for better SEO.