In Moldova some clients search in Romanian, some in Russian, and plenty switch depending on what they're looking for. If you want all of them to find you, Google has to be able to see each language version of your site separately. When that goes wrong, the translation is rarely the problem. The way the site is built usually is.
How people here search
The same person might type "reparație frigidere Chișinău" one day and "ремонт холодильников Кишинёв" the next. Part of the Russian-speaking audience also uses Yandex. If search engines can only see one language on your site, you're missing a big share of those searches.
The mistake we see most
The site has a language button that swaps the text but keeps the same address. It looks fine to a person. Google's crawler doesn't press buttons, though. It sees one version, usually the default, and for search purposes the other language doesn't exist.
The other common one is machine translation applied in the browser. The translated text shows up on screen but isn't in the HTML that Google reads.
Separate addresses, hreflang, canonical
Each language needs its own address, /servicii/ and /ru/servicii/ for example.
Each page then needs hreflang tags in its code that point to all its language versions, itself included. If the versions don't list each other, Google ignores the tags.
A canonical tag tells Google which address is the main one for a page, so copies aren't treated as duplicates. And the page's lang attribute should say which language it's actually written in.
This site works that way: every page exists in Romanian, Russian and English, and the versions point to each other.
Write for each language
People don't search in translations. "Creare site" and "создание сайтов" aren't word-for-word equivalents, but they're what people type. Russian copy should be written for someone reading in Russian, not converted line by line from Romanian. The same goes for page titles and descriptions.
Titles and descriptions
Every page in every language needs its own title, around 60 characters, and a description of about 155. They're what people see in the results, and they decide whether anyone clicks. A Romanian title sitting on a Russian page is more common than you'd expect.
Check your own site in five minutes
- Open the Russian version and look at the address bar. Same address as the Romanian page? That's the first problem.
- Search Google for
site:yourdomain.mdand see whether pages in both languages come up. - View the page source (Ctrl+U) and search for
hreflang. If it isn't there, Google doesn't know the versions belong together. - Look at the title of the Russian page. Is it in Russian?
Most of this can be fixed without rebuilding the site. It's part of our website development work.