On December 31 of 2021, John Mueller of Google spoke out on a question that was asked during the Google Search Central SEO Office Hours livestream regarding poor translations on a website. Basically, if the translations you have on a specific pages on your website will impact the quality of the rest of your website.
Here is the question given to Muller to answer:
“I wonder if a poor translation of a new language version can negatively affect the SEO for (the) domain’s more established main language versions.”
With this question, Mueller responded:
Mueller:
“I guess the short answer is yes.
The main issue is less about these being translated versions of the content, but more that for some things, we look at the quality of the site overall.
Ans when we look at the quality of the site overall, if you have significant portions that are lower quality it doesn’t matter for us like why they would be lower quality.
If they’re just bad translations, of if they’re terrible content or whatever.
But if we see that there are significant parts that are lower quality then we might think overall this website is not so fantastic as we thought.
And that can have effects in different places across the website.
So in short, I guess if you have a very low quality translation that’s also indexed and that’s also very visible in search, then that can definitely pull down the good quality translation as well or the good quality original content that you also have.”
Watch at 6:53 Minute Mark
