Google loves unique and original content. It rewards websites for originality by ranking them higher on the search results. On the other hand, Google penalises websites which have duplicate content.
What is duplicate content?
Google’s definition of duplicate content is “substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content in the same language or are appreciably similar”.
Duplicate content is basically similar or exact same content appearing across several websites, or different pages on the same website.
When Google finds different sources with similar content across the internet, it struggles to identify which version to rank for query results. In some cases, Google ends up not ranking any of the pages which have same or similar content.
Now this is something anyone would want to avoid, right?
But what about translated content?
Good news! Google sees translated content as new content, when done correctly. When you translate content from one language to another, the changes are sufficient to qualify your translated content as new content. This is only true if your content is translated by professionals.
You might be tempted to use Google translate, or any other automated translation service, to translate your website into as many languages possible. Take our advice, don’t do it. This will only make your search rankings drop.
Automated translation services swap words to the closest word in the other language, resulting in incorrect grammar and an unclear message. This will trigger spam flags and Google will consider it as bad content, or even worse, duplicate content. Google says that text translated by an automated tool without human review or curation before publishing can lead them to take action on such content.
Professional translators are able to convey the original tone and intent of a message into the translated text. Content translated by professional translators reads as if it was written in the language into which it has been translated.
So next time you want to translate your content, get in touch. We’ll be happy to help! And Google will not consider your content to be duplicate content.