Foreign languages and SEO: product description

[sami80]

Hi everyone,

I have hit a brick wall with regards with the SEO of one of our sites.

This is concerning a Belgium based webshop which sells toys. The server is based in the Belgium and the domainname ends also .be . They try to put as much possible dutch/belgium text on the website but the amount of this is very low compared to the english text on the website.

The problem starts when they import product description from the main manufacturer which is in english. this means when the customer visits the website, it's dutch, but the product description is in english

I have pointed out this but they pointed out the fact they import with 1 click 500 products, but it takes them ages to translate this to dutch.

Now is my theory, the way they are doing this, will hurt their ranking a lot in the google.be search engine compared to their competitors to the point that less than 10% of their site is in dutch/belgium and the rest in english.

I am thinking of the possibility of suggesting to let them use google translate to automatically translate the products before putting them on the website. It won't be a great translation, but it will stop hurting their ranking and will even contribute to increase their ranking.

I thought they do this, and put a small link to the english version of the manufacturer.

I would love to hear others thoughts on how to do this with as efficient and fast as possible.

[Maayboli]

It depends on which language customers are searching for.

I have faced very similar situation. It is further complicated by the TLD which is  not from same country users coming from. The website in one language and product description in another.

We gradually added product description in both the language on same page (one below other). Even the  website is in language A, the product descriptions are in language B (with 10% of pages have A and B both). But found that majority of the customers are searching in language B (which is english) and still it ranks well and customers get what they want.  When we see search volume for a product in language A is increasing, we add translation in language A for that product on the top of existing description in language B.