Hello All,

Quick question for the experts out there.

I am currently attempting to do some link building in Italian. As I do not speak Italian, I have opted to write articles in English, with Italian elements to it, with links back to the appropriate and relevant sites using my italian keywords as the anchor text.

Considering this is sorta a mix of english content with some italian links and content - is this a complete waste of time in terms of link building?

Would you suggest trying to contact Italian websites instead with an english email?

Of course ideally is to get articles written entirely in Italian and include the keywords as anchor text in Italian - but I cannot find decent italian article and PR sources.

Cheers

Critter

Hi Critter

It's tricky. As you don't speak Italian, if you are serious about targeting the Italian market, you really need to hire someone who does speak the language and get them to help you. May I ask why you are trying to build links in Italian to begin with?

Hi Critter

It's tricky. As you don't speak Italian, if you are serious about targeting the Italian market, you really need to hire someone who does speak the language and get them to help you. May I ask why you are trying to build links in Italian to begin with?

My target market is the Italian search engines and Italian traffic, so ideally, it would be optimal to target and build links in italian as my targeted keywords are in Italian as well.

Cheers

Critter

Can I broaden this question? Rather than focusing on whether Critter speaks Italian, let's suppose he does speak Italian (It would not be hard to get the articles and emails translated), are there any ideas about how to build those links. Even in French and Spanish, much bigger Internet languages, I ahve not seen many (any?) article banks or Yahoo article blast groups for non-English articles.

Hi Kal.

Is there anyone on this board who does Italian SEO? I would be interested in hearing from him/her.

Still curious on people's opinion on whether english links with italian keywords is of any use?

Also like mentioned above, where can one find PR and articles resources for Italian.?

CRITTER

Still curious on people's opinion on whether english links with italian keywords is of any use?

Yes. And no. Any link is useful, but it's only very useful if the page it is on is optimized for the same word you are targeting in the link text. So a link optimized for "forno" will carry no relevance on a page optimized for "oven" ... unless, you can work "formo" into your English text enough to make the linking page relevant. (That is the beuty of article-posting!)

Tough job!

You would have to target KWs and interests that are common to the two cultures. Considering that few Italians speak English I wouldn't bather, making mixed languages pages unless you really hit an audience of educated Italian people.

I have a poker website in Italian with english language banners, it is doing quite poorly in terms of click through rates. I need to fix that. I also have a few Italian ringtone sites that are doing well but they are all in Italian. The ringtone sites have inbound links from American sites it actually works, but it is better to breakthrough the language barrier.

Hope that helped!

Thanks Critter for an excellent topic. I am anxious to see if there are any good sources of non-English language copywriting out there too.

One thing I may suggest is going to some of the top SEO's in EU and seeing if you can work out a partnership. They will more than likely be experienced in accounting for other important factors such as which types of sites generate the most click-through traffic in Italy as well as potential sites to avoid. Other regional customs or preferences may be something to plan for... hypothetically maybe Italians, like Hispanics , may want to know they can pick up the phone and call someone (see Lucas Morea, Barbara and Nacho's presentation (http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/002370.html) in SJ 2005).

At SES Chicago there were a few European companies represented (see the later part of this recap (http://www.instantposition.com/website-promotion/news/SESChicago2005Day3Recap.htm) of Day 3), and I would assume as many if not more will be at SES NYC.

Hi Critter,

I'm french native and living in Italy since 1982, so I speak perfectly both languages (it's my full time job).
Since I'm localizing websites (in french and/or in italian) I'm also aware about SEO but could you explain me what you want to do exactly. Maybe I can help you.
Jean-Marie

Hi Critter,

just to clarify.

I am an Italian SEO expert currently working at MIVA. I have optimized a number of Italian and American sites.

I can answer any question related to SEO in the Italian Search Market.

Link building in any language is principally the same as in English - except that the smaller the language - the fewer resources there are available to go and do the link building.

However, the number you need is different too - as there may be considerably less competing sites than in English (depending on the language of course).

And you need the links to be local - as well as in language.

I think for any language you could find an agency to help you in that language - what we try to do is to achieve that in all the major languages - which is much trickier - but saves considerable time for our clients.

It's a shame Chris missed the 'Global Search Landscape' session at Chicago - which I did with Lucas Morea, David Temple and Nacho - where we tried to cover the world.

Specifically on critter's point - all links may be good - but a page which is in multiple languages is going to be recognised by the language recognition as being in one language or another - not both. The links may have a value - but there's also a danger of distortion and it's not something we'd recommend or ever do!

Hi Andy...funny you should mention that...I actually covered the last part of that session (http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/002905.html), and nacho went over your highlights. Please feel free to further "fill in the blanks," and I will go back and re-edit that post.

Chris - thanks for pointing me to that post which I hadn't seen! Pretty good summary. On the .eu domain comment you make in there - just to be clear - I'm saying noone knows how .eu is going to be treated by the search engines when it goes live!