Running an Adult Site in Several Languages (Without Breaking SEO)

Most adult search traffic outside the English-speaking world is in other languages, and most independent tubes ignore it. Serving machine-translated versions of your pages opened up searches our English pages never reached. It also produced a set of bugs worth knowing about before you start.

The structure

• One subfolder per language: /es/, /de/, /fr/ and so on, mirroring the English URL paths.
• Each language version is self-canonical: /es/video/abc canonicalises to itself, not to the English page.
• Every version lists all the others in hreflang link tags, plus x-default pointing to the English page. The set must be identical on every version.
• A separate sitemap for the language URLs, listed in robots.txt, makes discovery much faster.

What to translate, and what never to

• Translate: titles, descriptions, navigation, buttons, tag and category names, the lang attribute, and right-to-left direction for Arabic and Hebrew.
• Never translate: video URLs, embed code, player configuration, JSON data inside the page, or anything a script reads. A translation layer that touched an app’s embedded data broke the page in a way that only showed up in some browsers.
• Performer and studio names stay as they are.

Videos already in another language

If a video’s original title is Spanish, it belongs on the Spanish version of your site, with its original title. Machine-translating it into English and then back into other languages produces nonsense and duplicate pages. We list such videos only on their own language version and keep them out of the English listings and sitemaps.

Speed: cache everything

Translating a page on every request is slow, and slow pages get flagged. Search engines’ tools reported our translated pages as too slow until the translations were cached. Translate each unique string once, store it, and serve cached HTML. Pre-warm the cache for your most important pages after each deploy, and clear the cache for a site whenever its templates change.

Language switching for visitors

• Offer a visible language switcher that links to the same page in the other language. Don’t redirect people automatically based on browser language; let them choose, and let crawlers see every version.
• Once a visitor picks a language, keep them in it as they click around. Our first version dropped people back into English after one click.
• Check the translated pages on a phone. Longer words in German or Russian break layouts that look fine in English.

Which engines care

Yandex responded fastest to our Russian and Turkish versions. Google indexes translated pages more slowly and, like everything else, mostly on sites it already trusts. Naver (Korean) and Seznam (Czech) are worth registering with if you serve those languages.

Machine translation is fine, if it is honest

Readers forgive imperfect machine translation of a video title. They don’t forgive pages that are half translated, broken, or stuffed with keywords. Use a decent translation engine, keep the source text clean, and don’t add translated text that says nothing.