Leverage Foreign Blogs

When your blog acquires enough visibility, you may be approached by foreign bloggers who’ll ask you to translate some of your content into their own language.

Let them publish your translated content (for free). You will get further distribution of your ideas and/or products as well as a backlink from a potentially popular blog or online magazine. The only condition you should have is that the article is credited to you and that it links back to your original post. In fact, you may even go so far as to actively scout for related blogs in other languages and then propose such an arrangement yourself.

Most of the people who approach you and offer to translate your content are genuine bloggers who are interested in propagating your content in other languages.

When a translation is published on someone else’s site, you can decide if you want to link back to the translation from your original article or not (e.g., “This article is also available in Spanish, Japanese, and Chinese.”). You don’t have to. Some bloggers opt to do so, however, and this is where scammers see an opportunity.

From time to time you may be approached by scammers who will ask you if they can translate a highly popular article of yours. You’ll say it’s OK, and they’ll supposedly work on a translation. Then they’ll send you a link to a page that seemingly includes your translation and in turn, they’ll ask you to include a backlink to their translation from your article page that has high authority.

The scam factors in when the page you’ve been pointed to is not an actual translation of your article. Scammers may keep the title, but the content will have nothing to do with what you wrote. Even if they do translate your content, perhaps badly via Google Translate, don’t be afraid of saying no to the request of linking back to the translation.

Link back only when you receive a link to a quality translation of your actual content. Again, Google Translate can help you figure that out, but a friend or reader who speaks the language would be better.

Evaluate the overall quality of their blog and not just the translation. If the foreign site isn’t in your niche, contains translated content about all sorts of unrelated topics, or is plastered in ads, an offer to translate your content may have little to do with admiration and a whole lot to do with SEO and link building. Don’t be afraid to say no to requests for backlinks to translations from your original article or page.