Are my translated pages damaging my ranking?

[sparkit]

Hi there,

I have a site in English but with duplicates in different languages.

The first problem is that these translated versions of my site receive no ranking on google stars (while the english does) - why is this?

The second problem is that SEOmoz counts the errors on my site and then duplicates this error count for all the translated versions of my site - meaning I have a huge amount of errors (too many on-page links).

Add this to the fact that I use affilite ID´s to track different types of traffic to my site - so all page urls in english and other languages, with an affiliate id on the end of the url, count as an error.

This means I have a huge amount of on page errors indicated by SEOmoz, plus no ranking for my translated pages - I think this is really harming my overall ranking and site trust.

What are your opinions on this?

[EvolveCreative]

Do you have the translations on language specific TLDs or as a subfolder or a subdomain on your current site? Is the translation being done by a widget or was the content hand-translated by a professional translator?

[Bryan_Loconto]

What dave is saying is it's better to have unique content for each language because it gets crawled.

[sparkit]

Hi dave, thanks for your reply.

Our translations across the site are as a subdomain, they are hand-translated

[EvolveCreative]

Did you claim the subdomain as a new language in webmaster tools?

[Everett]

Bryan I really don't think that is what Dave is saying.

[Everett]

Is there a subdomain for each language?

Is there a "default" language that exists on the primary domain (i.e. English on www.yourwebsite.com)?

Are you using rel href lang, X-Default Hrefe Lang, rel canonical, or other "tags" or solutions for this at the moment?

If you could share the website address we wouldn't have to ask these questions, by the way. I know that is especially tough on client sites, but I just wanted to say that Dave has asked some vital questions, including the one about setting each subdomain as its own language / geographic target audience. Here is what he is asking about: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=62399

It is not necessary to have completely unique content for each language, as someone suggested below.