A visitor from Google I never expected!

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Recently, I was taking a look at my visitor statistics via MyBlogLog, and I realized that I got a visitor that came through Google Search.

I’ve been getting some visitors through Google from time to time, especially on some very targeted key phrases. Okay, so there is one more courtesy of the Big G. I’ve to say I was pretty glad though, and decided to check out the the exact keyphrase which the visitor keyed in.

To my great surprise, the keyword phrase isn’t in English!

It was Arabic!

If you are curious to know what is the phrase, there you go - ?????? ??????

For a moment, I was stumped. But my site is in English! I do not understand Arabic at all, much less write it! So how did someone who typed in an Arabic phrase in Google end up on my site?

It was then that it hit me. Yes! I’ve actually installed a little plugin two months back that can translate my blog to nine other different languages. This nifty little plugin make use of the Google translation engine to translate the content of my site into Mandarin, Korean, Portuguese, French, Japanese, Italian, German, Spanish and French.

So what happened was that the translated content was cached, and indexed by the Google bots that came to crawl my site. So that explains it! The translated Arabic keyword phrase was related to the keyword phrase typed in by the visitor, and my site was shown up in 7th position if I did not remember correctly.

I did a check today, and my website was nowhere to by seen for that Arabic keyword phrase. Still, I’ve to say that I’m pleasantly surprised and am glad to have someone coming in to my site in this manner.

For your information, you can translate the content to my blog to any of the other nine languages, by simply clicking any of the flags at the top of my sidebar (on the right). Do be warned that the translations are literal, so be prepared for some rather funny sentence structuring. I did have a good laugh reading the Mandarin translation of my blog.

The moral of the story here is we shouldn’t underestimate the usefulness of translating your site to other languages. Translation pays. There are a lot of non-English speaking visitors around. We are talking about a vast amount of netizens in just China alone.

By having your site in other languages, you are widening the market for yourself and giving yourself much greater exposure. You never know what kind of traffic it can bring. Non-English speaking visitors may even thank you for making your content on your site available in their language.

If you are a WordPress user, you can translate your blog using the Global Translator plugin. It comes at no cost, and doesn’t take long to set the whole thing up. You will have some fun seeing your site in other languages. No kidding!

Update: I’ve since got visitors from people typing their search keywords in Mandarin and Portuguese. So yes - translating your site is definitely worth it! Do it today!

Will the translated article distort the original(english) article’s message?

The translation is literal, so there is a chance that the original meaning of the message will be distorted. However it shouldn’t be that big of a problem.

[...] Remember the post I wrote regarding a visitor from Google search which I did not expect? People are searching for long tail keywords in foreign languages (etc. Arabic, Mandarin, [...]

[...] Basically, it translates your site to 13 other different languages (used to be 9), such as Mandarin, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese and Italian. It also helps to bring in more traffic as well. How? You can read more here. [...]