Help Googlebot Understand Your Multilingual Site

Google's John Mueller chimed in on a Webmaster Central Help Forum thread about an international website that automatically translates text depending on the user's detected language. Pay attention, if you're doing this on your site because this is important! Mueller says,

"autogenerated (auto-translated) text should not be indexed. Additionally it's important that sites use separate URLs for individual languages, so that users who are looking for an English page (even if their browser is set to German), are able to access those pages. This also allows our polyglot Googlebot to read all language pages and index them separately. If your system currently keeps the same URL and swaps in a translation, that would be a bit confusing to users (and Googlebot)."