How I Penalized Using Translated Content in SEO?

Did you ever use translated content in SEO? For your money site or anything else? I bet no, not at 2019.

Not everyone is dumb enough like me to use translated content for money site. Yes, I am the idiot who did it but for the test purpose only. Let’s go into the details why and how I did it first?

How I Use Translated Content in SEO?

I was working on a non-English project. It was a client project. So while checking competitors, I found an outstanding content on his website. I am using chrome and auto-translation is set on it. So I noted down the list of things for my client to update his piece of content in a better way. Then suddenly I got an idea why not checking a few non-English amazon affiliate website. So I checked a few and got that stupidest idea. So immediately I choose a niche and set content from the few German sites.

Why German?

I checked multiple languages, and I found German translated content reads better than other. I don’t know it might be my point of view. So I did translate content on specific niches and published it on the website. It was an old domain with few backlinks. Not expired domain, I registered it three years ago. And within two month’s I saw a great impact in ranking. Here is the ranking screenshot before it got penalized –

So you can see it had some good impact on ranking. Even I started earning some average no. of money from the Amazon. Oh my bad, the site was set for amazon affiliate. I forgot to mention it before. Here is the screenshot of the Amazon earning report. It’s not the overwhelming amount I know, but still, it made something for nothing.

So using translated content in SEO is not a bad thing. This was the thought of mine at that point. As it’s for the test purpose, I was planning to do something serious. I would not lie on it that yes, I was tempted enough to do it seriously. Sounds like a big dumbass? I am. 🙁

What I exactly do for the content?

Gather multiple contents for a single keyword. Guess my keyword is – best baby stroller. Then I translate it into German. Search it at Google.de. Gather the ranked few websites and collect all the content. –

• Organize it properly and create around 5-6k words content in total.
• Translate it using the translator and turn the content into English.
• Check the uniqueness and make sure its 100% unique.
• Check via Grammarly and fix it properly.
• Use hemingwayapp.com to increase the readability.

To prepare one content will take around 1-2 hours work. And that’s it. You are ready to post. I just posted it on the site with proper On Page SEO. If you follow Rank Math SEO plugin list for On page, then it’s enough to do. If you don’t know about this plugin then it just a new one like Yoast but with more options. It’s still in the beta process. For now, I am using it and experience is incredible. I will write a review of the rank math plugin in my next post.

What Happened?

I was doing great with those translated content. Started earning money from the Amazon. As I told, I was tempted enough to make it bigger. Then new updated ruled out. The site got slapped pretty bad within a week. No message at webmaster or manual report. It just de-ranked for all the keywords. Here is the screenshot after the hit –

So it was a significant drop for me. I did some research and found out about this translated content issue.

Main source –

https://www.seroundtable.com/auto-translated-content-spam-google-26380.html

Even Matt Cutt talked about translated content way back at 2011.

If you are using translated content, you need to be aware of now. Because Google now watches the purpose of using the translated content.

How I recover?

As I said, it was for the test purpose only. So I learned my lesson from it. I again proved myself a big zero. I had nothing to lose here. So thought to give a try if I can recover from this or not? So I started working on it again. What I did –

• Remove all the content from the website.
• Rewrite all the content in a new way. Put all the new content on the site.
• Use the same URL for each post it was before.
• Target new keyword this time for each of the post. LSI with less search volume and competition.

Within this month, I again see some positive movement. Now I have confirmed that the drop was for content purpose solely. Because in this meantime, I don’t work for any link building. Today’s screenshot –

Even I saw three orders at Amazon today. I didn’t plan anything for this website yet. It was used to experiment this translated content only. It got penalized, and I believe it’s recovering as well now. I will post an update if there any.

The summary is using translated content not safe anymore. You can do it, but you need to work with it first. Just coping it, fix some primary issue and post will not work anymore.