You added a button with a US flag to your website, and now it's bilingual. Months later you search for your business on Google and find your page with the menu in English and the text in Spanish. Or you search in English for what you sell, and your English version is nowhere to be found.
A badly built English and Spanish website ranks worse on Google than a single-language site done right. Google has nothing against English. The trouble is that the two versions get in each other's way: one goes missing, the other gets duplicated, and Google ends up showing the wrong one. Here's how that happens, where the English version should live, what hreflang is, why a translation plugin isn't enough and what to translate first if you can't translate everything.
How a bilingual website cannibalizes itself
Cannibalization is when two of your own pages compete with each other on Google and take ground from each other. On a two-language website it happens in four ways, and all four come straight from Google's documentation:
- One address for both languages. The page switches language based on the visitor's browser or a saved preference, but the address at the top never changes. Google recommends a different address for each language and warns that otherwise it might not find all your versions. The one it doesn't find doesn't exist for anyone searching.
- Sending each visitor to a language based on their country. By default, Google's crawler visits websites from connections in the United States and without saying which language it prefers (Google). If your site sends people from there to the English version, Google may never see the Spanish one, which is exactly the one your local clients search for. That's why Google asks you not to redirect based on the language you think a visitor speaks, and not to adapt the page to their location.
- Translating the menu and leaving the content in Spanish. To Google, two versions of a page are duplicates if the main content is in the same language (Google). When it finds duplicates, it groups them, picks one as the main page and checks the others less often. The one it picks may be the version with the English menu, and that's what your local clients will see. We go into more detail in our guide to duplicate content.
- Both languages on the same page. Google works out a page's language from the text people can see. To help it get that right, it recommends a single language per page, in both the content and the menu, and no side-by-side translations.
A Spanish-only website, done right, has none of these problems: Google sees every page, knows what language each one is in and doesn't have to pick between copies. That's why it beats a badly built bilingual one.
Where English goes: /en/ or a subdomain
This is how Google compares the ways to organize the address of each language:
| Option | Example | What Google says |
|---|---|---|
| Folder, after the name | yourbusiness.com/en/ | Easy to set up and maintain: everything lives on the same site |
| Subdomain, before the name | en.yourbusiness.com | Easy to set up and can be hosted separately. Visitors can't always tell whether "en" means a language or a country |
| Parameter, at the end | yourbusiness.com/?lang=en | Not recommended |
Google doesn't work out the language from the address: neither /en/ nor the "en." in a subdomain tells it anything. It reads the text you can see on the page (Google). The address is for you and your clients, and what matters is that each language has its own, stable and easy to understand.
For a business with a single website, a folder is usually the simplest choice: one site and one hosting plan. It makes no difference whether Spanish lives directly at yourbusiness.com and English in /en/, or each language gets its own folder (/es/ and /en/). This blog uses the first option: this article lives under /en/blog/ and its Spanish version under /blog/.
What hreflang is, in one sentence
Hreflang is a line in the code of each page that tells Google: "this page has a twin in another language, and here's its address."
Google can read what language each page is in, but hreflang tells it which pages are pairs. With that, according to its documentation, it can show each person the version in their language. Three rules, all from Google:
- Each version names itself and every other version. The Spanish page points to the Spanish one and the English one; the English page does the same.
- The two point to each other, both ways. If the Spanish page points to the English one and the English one doesn't point back, Google ignores those lines.
- A third one, x-default, says which version to show to people whose browser is set to a language that's neither of the two.
On this blog, every translated article carries those three lines: one to the Spanish version, one to the English version and the x-default, which points to Spanish.
Why an automatic translation plugin isn't enough for a page that sells
A plugin is an add-on you install on your website. Some translation plugins create an address for each language and add hreflang on their own. With those, the technical side is covered. Others translate the page on the fly without giving it an address of its own, so Google has no English version to show. The free version of GTranslate, for example, says on its own website that its translated pages don't have their own addresses and so aren't indexed, meaning they never make it into Google.
Even with the technical side right, a page that sells needs more than translated words. The machine translates what your page says, but it doesn't add what a client from abroad is missing:
- The price. "RD$4,500 + ITBIS," translated, still doesn't tell a tourist how much that is in dollars or that ITBIS is the Dominican sales tax.
- Payment. "Pay by bank transfer" is no help to someone in another country without an account at a Dominican bank.
- Contact. Your WhatsApp number with the +1 in front and your hours with the time zone, because they're writing from a different one.
- What locals take for granted. How to book, what's included and how much is paid upfront all have to be spelled out.
Machine translation isn't forbidden. In its policies, what Google goes after is content that adds nothing for the reader, no matter how it's created, and in June 2025 it removed from its documentation the advice to block automatically translated pages. What the machine can't do is check that your offer makes sense to someone from abroad. Someone who speaks English has to review that before it goes live.
What to translate first if you can't translate everything
Start with what a client from abroad needs to make up their mind and message you, in this order:
- The page for what people from abroad buy most. The tour, the treatment, the rental or the service you sell to people who don't live here.
- The price and how to pay from abroad.
- How hiring you works. People buying from abroad don't know how things work here, and they pick whoever explains it. How to write that page is in this guide.
- Contact. WhatsApp with the full number and your hours with their time zone.
Everything else can wait: the blog, the news, the company history. In the meantime, use hreflang only between pages that exist in both languages. And make the language button lead to the twin of the page you're on: if that page doesn't have an English version yet, it's better not to offer one than to send visitors to the English homepage as if it did.
How to check your website in two minutes
Do it on a computer, with the page that matters most to you:
- Switch the language. If the address at the top doesn't change, that page has a single address for both languages, and Google can only keep one of them.
- Look for hreflang. Press Ctrl+U (Cmd+Option+U on a Mac) to see the page's code, then Ctrl+F and type "hreflang." You should see one line per language plus the x-default. Do the same on the English version: it has to point back to the Spanish one. If nothing shows up, ask whoever built your website: it can also be declared in the sitemap, the file that lists your pages for Google.
- Read the English version as a tourist would. Can you tell how much it costs in dollars, how to pay from abroad and how to get in touch? If any answer is no, that's the first page to fix.
If your website has an English version and you're not sure Google sees both, message us on WhatsApp with the link: we'll tell you what's wrong, what to translate first and what it costs to fix.