URL language on Global Sites

[Ryan_Henry]

Has anyone looked into a page not ranking as well because the URL is in English when the subdomain is geared for a different country and different language?

I can defiantly see this taking away from the user experience, but didn't know if there was any concrete evidence or case studies that would show if it is a big deal or not for rankability?

I know this is a backwards question to begin with because the priority over rankability is always UX, but there may not be a way to fix it unless I can prove it is a big deal.

[MattAntonino]

I've seen this once - but it wasn't a test or anything - a lot of uncontrolled variables makes it hard to say it was the link or not.  But, we changed and improved.

We had site.com/es/word.   When we changed it to site.com/es/palabra and it started ranking much higher.

My guess would be that through co-citation and such, more sites link to /palabra/ type links than they do to English words.  Perhaps the same has happened to you?