Rolls out Updates for International Sites
Google has made some great improvements for international sites. First, Google knows that the Website Translator tool isn't perfect, and that no online translator will ever be perfect. To help solve this problem, Google will let you create a custom translation for your site.
That way when users use Google's translation tool they will see your custom translation. Suppose a user sees an error, or notices that the translation is wrong. Well they can also suggest a better translation for your site. When they suggest a better translation they can tell Google what they think should be changed, and later on you can choose to accept the new suggestion for your site.
Here are the directions from Google on how create a custom translation:
To get started:
- Add the Website Translator plugin and customization meta tag to your Web site
- Then translate a page into one of 60+ languages using the Website Translator
To tweak a translation:
- Hover over a translated sentence to display the original text
- Click on 'Contribute a better translation'
- And finally, click on a phrase to choose an automatic alternative translation -- or just double-click to edit the translation directly.
Secondly, Google has support to allow you to specify rel-alternate-hreflang annotations in your sitemap. This can help you reduce the size of your site pages and make them a little more efficient.
Until this update if you wanted alternate language versions of your site you needed to add an html tag on both pages as such:
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="http://www.example.com/en" >
<link rel=&q...