What is the current thinking about translated versions of pages? Is it necessary

[appbackr]

My company is about to do a big push in China.  We can get our homepage translated in Chinese at a very reasonable price.  My questions are:

• Is it worth it? Do browsers to an adequately job of translating pages?

If it is worth it:

• Can someone suggest a good post explaining what to do with the translation?
• What are the SEO implications?

Thank you
Sarah

[Oren.]

This is a big question and I'll do my best to answer it as much as I can.

First off, it's VERY important.  Mandarin to English Translation within browsers is terrible (I say this having lived in Beijing and worked as an English Language web marketer there).  Make sure your cheap translation is done by someone who is Bilingual and proficient in translating English to Simple Chinese, otherwise you can end up with a translation that doesn't make grammatical sense (the differences in grammar and characters make accurate translation difficult).

SEO is different in different languages, you have to consider what users will be searching for.  Also keep in mind that many people will be searching with Baidu or even Bing rather than Google (which is semi-blocked in China), and you will have to adjust your SEO tactics accordingly.  Baidu almost exclusively indexes and serves pages in Simple Chinese, (the language of their users) so a good translation is crucial.  Also -- you're going to have to do some link building from Chinese Language sites, your English Language link profile will not do you much good.

It's takes a long time, but if you can get a regional address (ie .cn) that is a big trust signal.  Local hosting also helps.

Finally, it's important to realize that China is a decently developed space with a lot of national pride.  You're not going to have a great user experience if your pages are poorly translated, especially if there is a local alternative.  If you want to do business in China, make the investment in an excellent translation.

Hope that helps.

[appbackr]

Technically, how do I do this? Does our site look at the default language setting in the user's browser?

[Oren.]

There are a few ways to do it that have advantages and disadvantages.  Your best best is probably to serve users based on their location, rather than their language -- since someone browsing in Chinese in another country probably has no use for the China based version of your site.

I know that can be done through Javascript, and I imagine there are other ways to do it.  I'm not an expert on that, but there is a lot of information out there about it.

Oh, and here's Google's bare bones explanation of the dos and don'ts of Multilingual sites: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en#1.  There's not a lot there but it's important to keep in mind.