Valid, SEO-Friendly Post Translation Links

Posted on December 9, 2008 in Websites by

Ever wanted to provide automatic language translations of your web pages without installing another plugin? Here is a valid, SEO-friendly technique that takes advantage of Google’s free translation service. All you need is a PHP-enabled server and you’re good to go. Just copy and paste the following code into the desired location in your page template and enjoy the results. Once in place, this code will produce translation links for eight common languages for every page on your site. Grab, gulp and go:

<ul id="translations">
	<li><a href="http://translate.google.com/translate?u=<?php echo urlencode('http://'.$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'].$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']); ?>&amp;langpair=en%7Cde" rel="nofollow">Translate this page to Deutsch</a></li>

	<li><a href="http://translate.google.com/translate?u=<?php echo urlencode('http://'.$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'].$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']); ?>&amp;langpair=en%7Ces" rel="nofollow">Translate this page to Espanol</a></li>

	<li><a href="http://translate.google.com/translate?u=<?php echo urlencode('http://'.$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'].$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']); ?>&amp;langpair=en%7Cfr" rel="nofollow">Translate this page to Francais</a></li>

	<li><a href="http://translate.google.com/translate?u=<?php echo urlencode('http://'.$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'].$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']); ?>&amp;langpair=en%7Cit" rel="nofollow">Translate this page to Italiano</a></li>

	<li><a href="http://translate.google.com/translate?u=<?php echo urlencode('http://'.$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'].$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']); ?>&amp;langpair=en%7Cpt" rel="nofollow">Translate this page to Portugues</a></li>

	<li><a href="http://translate.google.com/translate?u=<?php echo urlencode('http://'.$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'].$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']); ?>&amp;langpair=en%7Car" rel="nofollow">Translate this page to Arabic</a></li>

	<li><a href="http://translate.google.com/translate?u=<?php echo urlencode('http://'.$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'].$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']); ?>&amp;langpair=en%7Cja" rel="nofollow">Translate this page to Japanese</a></li>

	<li><a href="http://translate.google.com/translate?u=<?php echo urlencode('http://'.$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'].$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']); ?>&amp;langpair=en%7Cko" rel="nofollow">Translate this page to Korean</a></li>
</ul>

As formatted, this code will generate an unordered list of translation links. You may change this formatting or even style the links with their associated country flags using a little CSS. When used on blogs, this code will enable users to translate posts on the fly via automatic generation of the required URL parameter. Further, each page URL is encoded within the query string to ensure complete markup validation. Finally, this code even goes the extra mile by including nofollow attributes in each link, thereby preventing valuable link juice from needlessly leaking to the Google translation machine.

References

  • Shouts to donutey.com for the basic technique elaborated upon in this post.
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