Publishing in another language and SEO
If you’re creating content for a website, you might, occasionally, want to publish an article in a language different from the language of your other content. However, it’s difficult to rank with one specific article that’s written in a language that differs from the rest. So what should you do to improve the SEO of that article?
In this Ask Yoast, I’ll explain when to use hreflang, when to optimize your metadata in another language and what else you can do to help that article rank!
Justin from VPNgids.nl (VPNguide.nl) emailed us with this question:
“I’ve got a Dutch blog but I want to publish an article in English. What should I do? Should I just add an hreflang tag or something else?”
Check out the video or read the answer below!
English article on a Dutch blog
“In this case, the hreflang tag isn’t even really necessary. The only reason you would use an hreflang is if you had a Dutch version and an English version of the same article. If that’s the case, then you should use hreflang on both articles. In case of a separate article in English, what you should make sure of is that on the English article all the metadata shows that that is an English article and not a Dutch article. Unfortunately this is quite hard to do in WordPress, if you’re not running a multilingual plug-in.
But to be honest, if you’re going to publish in English, maybe you should just make a separate section of your site for it that is completely in English. Adding some more content to it would give you a lot more chance for ranking, than just having one article in English. Of course you have to start somewhere. So by all means create that English section, start with that one article and then slowly add on to it.
It’s always a good idea, if your Dutch and your English is good enough, to switch to English. The Dutch language area is only very small and the world is a lot bigger, with a lot of English speakers. So I would really encourage you to start doing stuff in English. Just like we did! I started blogging in English eight years ago, which is why Yoast is so popular now.
Good luck!”
Read more: hreflang: the ultimate guide »
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Agree with you about the language. If one wants to reach out for a bigger audience and start blogging about the niche, then English language is a better way to go and invest in contents. English is internationally recognized and almost everyone can understand it.
Regards
Does it really help for better SEO?
Does Google not consider it as duplicate content when you translate the same content in multiple languages?
So be cautious when you’re translating.
Also it creates multiple similar pages on search results and you don’t want to mess up with SEO related issues (when you’re starting out).
There are a ton of translating plugins out there and I tried some of them on few of my sites but nothing seems to be compatible with SEO related things.
Hello use your plugin for many years I wanted to ask you, (great SEO experts) if the implementation and translation of the pages of my site in English (https://www.preventivo-siti-web.it/) through a WordPress plugin language as Polylang could help the positioning of google.it (Italy). Clearly I would get the benefits in searches on Google.com ! can you give me any suggestions?
Hello. You can also use JavaScript to write an article in many languages and leave one for example an article in english and not include JavaScript. Let me know your feedback please. Have a nice day!
I’ve actually faced this problem. I run a Music Blog where I something post the same thing in both English as well as in Hindi in the same blog post. For example, writing lyrics of a Bollywood song . After doing this for a month, I thought of trying what has been mentioned here. I tried to make 2 totally different post which were individually Different in their language. And suddenly my website started getting organic traffic on Hindi as well as English versions of the lyrics. As we can expect even much more improvement related to SEO in local languages in future, I would really love to see more articles and as well as contribute as much as possible to the community of Yoast by commenting whatever I know and I’ve learnt till date. Thanks a lot Joost for this amazing article. :)
You’re welcome, Dibakar! Glad to hear you managed to achieve to get more organic traffic to your posts.
Thanks for your service.
I’ve actually been wondering about the optimal way to do this – thank you for the video.