International SEO: Matt Cutts (Google) speaks on how to localize content

Last week, Google’s head of Webspam Team, Matt Cutts, posted a video called “How should I handle localized content?”

n this video, Matt Cutts recommended the use of top level domains ( tld ) to target specific countries. For instance, to target the French market, it is always better to use a .fr domain name.  However, when this is not possible, the use of subdomains is another option for multilingual websites.

He also addressed the issue of using Google Translate to auto-translate the content of the website  into other languages, warning that this could be considered as web spam. In fact, according to Matt Cutts, Google would prefer the content of your multi-language website to be readable by humans. Often, using  Google Translate to produce the website content will be against Google’s guidelines.

At Openvalley, we know how to make your company meet Google’s recommendations. We build multilingual websites (one database with multiple country domain names), and we we work with native translators to provide great content for your multi-language website.