Recently I have been getting a lot of emails asking about the merits of so called multilanguage optimisation. These are normally from so called ‘SEO’s’ who offer this service for anything from $200-500 per language.

Is it worth it OWG I get asked. Well the answer is NO… and YES

Is it worth having multilanguage pages on your site? YES if they are done well AND provided you can deal with an enquiry in that language, because f you can’t then you are going to appear like a big ole fraud to that potentially large customer. Large in the meaning of spend, not calling them fat or anything like that.

Another thing to consider is the quality of the translation. Let me tell you a story about that. A while ago someone came up with a script that exploits the translation facility of the Google toolbar and also Yahoo toolbar etc. This script was circulated around, and eventually it, or a script LIKE it was sold for a chunk of money in one of these fantastic ‘use it or lose it , the next big thing on the web’ type broadcasts.

Google has now decided that as it is against the acceptable use terms and conditions to auto-query Google, and as these scripts ARE auto-querying Google, it will block the IP of the site that is using them. So think about the implications of that for a moment if you will.

To put it simply, using these scripts is against the terms and conditions of Google and yahoo etc. While not getting your site banned (apart from for the translation side of things), it might well raise a Google flag above your site, and might gain you unwanted notice.

Most of these SEO’s offering multilanguage promotion use these tools.

So to everyone who has asked me if it is worth it, I say… Draw your own conclusions