Friday, May 9, 2008

Multiple languages in business listings

Came across an interesting thread in the Google Maps Help Group, specifically about creating business listings for Google Maps in multiple languages. The original poster asked about having a website in multiple languages, and whether they should create multiple business listings targeting different languages. The response from Google was as follows:
We don't have any way to handle multi-language listings at this point in time, and we strongly encourage businesses to only create one listing per physical address. However, it's a great suggestion to support these types of business listings - maybe we'll be able to support this in the future.

There are two issues here:
  1. Does the site allow the business listing itself (e.g. address and contact info, etc.) in multiple languages?
  2. Does a local search site allow the listing of multiple web sites, in different languages?

At Nelso, we've got (1) covered. Simply by adding a listing in his or her native language, a business owner automatically gets listings and business details in all the languages that Nelso supports (and a lot of links - every language on Nelso has its own domain, so adding an URL to a business listing results in links from seven Nelso sites). This by itself is very useful for a business owner, especially restaurants and bars that want to reach tourists.

As for (2): this is an interesting idea (allowing businesses to link directly to the parts of their sites that are in different languages), and we might add this. Most multi-language sites have a splash page that allows the user to choose a language, but in some cases it might be useful to let a business owner explicitly link to the different languages on his or her site.

1 comment:

Jens Gregersen said...

Good post. Also what could be interesting and maybe its already possible on nelso. It would be cool if you could create custom listings within a category or just generic.

For example if I want to ceate my own custom restaurant listing for Prague but I dont want to use all of them but only a handful of them. Like My Favorites kind of thing.