i can say of myself that I kinda pioneered "auto translating on scale for SEO traffic" in 2008, 2009. at that time I was working for a startup incubator and one of our internal clients was tripwolf.com.
we had major success with an automated, aggregated SEO strategy for 123people.com and wanted to apply the learnings to the travel information space.
so we got high quality content from a lot of travel guide publishing houses and together with some other aggregation of yellow pages we translated the mostly german base content into en, fr, es, pt, .....
and it worked.
like crazy. for a short time we attracted more traffic than tripadvisor and yelp together (based on the competitive traffic data we had at that time). traffic (and my ego) exploded. we also did not go against any google guidelines, other than one: if you are spammy, you are spammy.
the google guidelines were updated (automated translated content seen as "pure spam") and next days the hammer of google came down, on different section of the websites, different markets and on and on. (the company much later migrated to a native app business model and was quite successful for a few years). the portuguese content worked the longest, even a few years later still got substantial traffic.
to my knowledge we were the biggest auto translate player at that time and we did it better than anyone else.
but all in all, it was 2008/09 and at that time for online startups the difference between traffic channel and product was not yet a known given. getting traffic via google + ads were seen as a sustainable business case. it was not. we had no real product, too much focus on SEO. so all in all, that strategy was longterm negative value.
nowadays I refuse to take any clients who do not have at least an MVP in place. cause even more traffic than your servers can handle will not save your startup, ever.
Why do you hate content made available in another language through automatic means? I've read lots of things auto-translated into English and it's always at least acceptable.
Translation from languages I don't know to English is fine with me.
Translation from well written text in languages I know to absolute garbage in my native language, that is what I hate.
Edit: I see you have a point. I missed the fact that GP was translating German to English.
I guess people who knows German slightly better than me (I can make myself understood and have used it as a working language for a very short while) will hate auto translated German almost as much as I and others hate autotranslated English, but not quite as much:
A lot of the problem with autotranslated text is that the physical thing or software we are supoosed to use still has English user interfaces so we are left trying to decode what the original text said.
There are obviously translation tools out there if you want to use them for yourself. But it seems fairly obvious to me that it's not desirable to flood the web and search results with a bunch of barely/sort-of understandable text that is the output of ML translation.
we had major success with an automated, aggregated SEO strategy for 123people.com and wanted to apply the learnings to the travel information space.
so we got high quality content from a lot of travel guide publishing houses and together with some other aggregation of yellow pages we translated the mostly german base content into en, fr, es, pt, .....
and it worked.
like crazy. for a short time we attracted more traffic than tripadvisor and yelp together (based on the competitive traffic data we had at that time). traffic (and my ego) exploded. we also did not go against any google guidelines, other than one: if you are spammy, you are spammy.
the google guidelines were updated (automated translated content seen as "pure spam") and next days the hammer of google came down, on different section of the websites, different markets and on and on. (the company much later migrated to a native app business model and was quite successful for a few years). the portuguese content worked the longest, even a few years later still got substantial traffic.
to my knowledge we were the biggest auto translate player at that time and we did it better than anyone else.
but all in all, it was 2008/09 and at that time for online startups the difference between traffic channel and product was not yet a known given. getting traffic via google + ads were seen as a sustainable business case. it was not. we had no real product, too much focus on SEO. so all in all, that strategy was longterm negative value.
nowadays I refuse to take any clients who do not have at least an MVP in place. cause even more traffic than your servers can handle will not save your startup, ever.