What SEO considerations for multiple languages on a single page?

[kwoolf]

I am working on a language teaching site for Chinese speakers learning English. I consider myself above average when it comes to basic SEO issues, but all I know here is that Google doesn't like multiple languages on a single page.

Without getting into too many details, both Chinese and English text will appear on the same page with links, tags, phonetic spellings, etc.

I'm hoping someone here knows the science about using the lang="zh" xml:lang="zh" attributes within text and the effects on ranking for text within the declarations. And it'd be great if there was clarification on the link juice passed using the hreflang attribute for both internal and external links. Also, of course, any info on using both English and Chinese characters in the URL would be most helpful. A heads up on any other language specific SEO issues would also be much appreciated.

My goal is to get the most out of both languages per page in terms of ranking.

[RyanPurkey]

Since it's native Chinese speakers I'd weight everything towards that priority, i.e. title tags begin in Chinese and then have their English translation. Obviously your going to run into problems with length there, but in other on page areas you should be fine. If it's only one page I'd also lean towards choosing zh as your language setting. One strategy that you could pursue however would be to code two separate, but duplicate pages, one in English, the other in Chinese that are on separate subdomains then as someone goes through the page they could study flash card style with translations being pulled from the other subdomain via a lightbox or something similar. It would be difficult and more work, but you'd also have more ability to really strengthen results, one for English and one for Chinese. Bilingual pages aren't my specialty though. I think a French / Canadian SEO could add some valuable input here as they have English and French as dual official language. Pinging someone from there could be useful, especially in a place like Montreal. Hopefully my above suggestion helps somewhat. Sorry I can't add more input about the science.

[kwoolf]

Thanks for the input Ryan. My challenge here is that both languages will be used on nearly all pages site wide. I'll look deeper into the JS lightbox method, but my initial thoughts are that the html would appear in multiple places on the site, and I'm not sure how search engines will treat an English document inside a Chinese document. Of course my priority is usability, but as I go through the design process, I was just hoping to find a way to get the search engines to count content in both languages toward SEO ranking.

[RyanPurkey]

Right. If both languages are to be that dominant it could justify the use of a subdomain for the English weighted portions, but it would take some clever coding to get it right.

[kwoolf]

I thought about a subdomain, but I think it would complicate things from an SEO standpoint. From what I've learned, a subdomain here would get treated as a separate domain and send link juice to an English page that wouldn't be accessible to visitors direct (only within another Chinese page as a lightbox). I'm sure there's a cleaner way to do this.

What I'm looking for is ranking effects of using the Lang element or ATTLIST declaration with lang element to identify various languages on the same page. Or if there is any other way to let search engines know I'm using multiple languages on a single page, it'd be a super time saver.

Thanks for all your input so far!