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If you value your search position and website traffic you may want to rethink the use of Google’s free automatic translation tool. Apart from the contextual and cultural issues raised by machine translation that have been so well documented throughout the web there is probably one more very good incentive why not to rely on them. In a recent video interview Matt Cutts, Google’s head of search spam, discussed spam tactics that Google will take action on.
Among them is automatically generated content, in fact, Google has a document specifically about this in the webmaster guidelines violation, named automatically generated content examples of content like this include:
• Text translated by an automated tool without human review or curation before publishing
• Text generated through automated processes, such as Markov chains
• Text generated using automated synonymizing or obfuscation techniques
• Text generated from scraping Atom/RSS feeds or search results
• Stitching or combining content from different web pages without adding sufficient value.
It seems strange that Google would issue penalties for using its own products, but it looks as if search engine spammers have been publishing lots of error ridden machine translated stuffing. There appears to be little doubt that poorly translated content could detrimentally impact your websites search engine rankings.
The cost of writing good quality content that meets the needs of both your customers and the search engine fraternity is probably the key obstacle for a website owner that wishes to expand and grow, using low quality free translation tools to expand into foreign markets is surely a false economy and should be avoided if at all possible. Using a professional language service provider like RVR Translation Limited to carry out your website translation should maximize the return on that investment.