Is my website really bilingual? (At least in the eyes of Google)

If you run a business in France and your website has a little flag switch in the corner, this one is for you.

I see it all the time on sites belonging to English-speaking business owners here in Nouvelle-Aquitaine who want to reach the French market. You click the flag button or dropdown, choose the language you want, the page flips into French, and job done. But are your French customers really covered?

Here's a test that takes ten seconds. Open your website, look at the address bar at the top, then click the French flag (or whatever other language the site offers). Did the address change? Something like yourbusiness.fr/en becoming yourbusiness.fr/fr? If it did, great, you can probably stop reading. If the address stayed exactly the same, then as far as Google is concerned, your French website doesn't exist. Which means you won't display in search results for that language, no matter how good your SEO is.

Let me explain why. When Google looks at your site, it reads pages, and every page has its own address. A French customer searching for a plumber or a gîte in your area is shown French pages, each with its own address that Google has read and stored. A translate button doesn't create any of those. It waits until a visitor has already landed on your English page, and then swaps the words on their screen. Google never sees that French version, so it never shows it to anyone searching in French. Google's own guidance for multilingual sites says exactly this: give each language its own address, rather than relying on cookies or browser settings to switch the language.

So the customers you most want to reach, the French people searching in French, are the ones who will never find you. The button only helps someone who has already found your site in English, and that's the person who needed it least.

Depending on how your site is built, there's a second problem: the translation itself. Often these buttons use machine translation, and nobody checks it. In fact, in many cases you can't change it even if it's wrong! It mangles idioms, picks the wrong word for your trade, and switches between tu and vous like it can't make up its mind. A French reader spots it in the first sentence, and the message they take away is that this business isn't really for them. Google isn't keen on it either. Unchecked machine translation is the kind of content it treats as low quality.

Now, I'm not here to tell you to throw your website away. These problems can be fixed.

Here's a little tip for anyone running a WordPress site. There are well known translation plugins, Polylang, TranslatePress, WPML and Weglot among them, and set up correctly they give every page its own French address and tell Google which version is which. Some of them do this even on their free versions. The catch is that some of the most popular flag plugins only do the on-screen swap unless you pay for an upgrade. They're quick to install, they look the part, and I suspect a lot of site owners have no idea that's all they do. If you paid someone to build your site, it's worth asking them which one you've got, or just try the flag test.

So what does a properly bilingual site look like? Two or more versions of every page, each with its own address, one in English and one in French, plus any other languages you use. Each page tells Google what language it's in and where its twin lives. The French text is written or checked by someone who speaks French, so it sounds like it was written for a French reader, because it was. And both versions appear in the list of pages your site gives to Google, so it knows to look at them.

At awattsdev, I handle both of these potential problems. For the projects I work on, each language version is a real page that Google has read. On top of this, they aren't machine translations. My sites store the actual translations for each language (in a special file type called JSON), so when you flip the flag, the site shows the text that you've provided.

So go and try the flag test on your own site. If the address doesn't change, ask whoever built it what they used for the French, and whether a French customer searching in French can find you. If half your customers are French, half your website should be too.

Andrew Watts, web developer based in Nouvelle-Aquitaine, France.