A new Search Appearance filter has surfaced in Google Search Console this month title ‘translated results’. The filter relates to situations where Google has translated the title link and snippet for a web page within Search.
According to Google’s documentation for translated results, the feature is currently available in certain languages (such as Indonesian, Hindi, Tamil, and more), and is only triggered on mobile.
Although the announcement of the feature came about in November of 2021, it was only at the end of April of 2022 that Google added details on monitoring performance in Google Search Console, with the addition of a new Search Appearance filter.
‘Translated results’ now joins various other Search Appearance filters, such as for Product results, Web Story, Good page experience, among others. Google’s documentation explains that the filter is for “search results in a language different from the query language, from selected sources”.
In my post, I will be detailing what I’m seeing so far in Google Search Console with the ‘translated results’ filter now appearing across several properties that I have access to, along with what is actually happening once triggered within Search Appearance.
The ‘Translated Results’ Search Appearance Filter
Google looks to have started showing the ‘translated results’ Search Appearance filter sometime within early May of 2022. As you can see in the feature image for this post, the earliest data point that I have dates back to the 2nd of May when recordings first started.
I’m also seeing other properties within my Google Search Console account that have started recording data as of the 10th of May, which is just a trickle of impressions. The site in my screenshot above is from quite a large site (international/translated in various languages), so it makes sense that more data is starting to come in there.
So what is actually happening on Google when the filter is triggered within GSC? The best explanation of this can be seen in the following image supplied by Google within their documentation.
As a visualisation, the above shows a situation for how the data can appear within Google Search Console. Clicks and impressions will be getting measured the same as they always have been.
For instance, if a user clicks the drop-down that is part of the snippet on mobile, this would count as an impression in the Search Appearance filter for ‘translated results’. It is only when the user clicks the actual snippet that has been translated to English that a click will be recorded.
Google rarely expands upon their Search Appearance filters, with the last time this happened being earlier this year with ‘product results’, seeing data for price approximations (without Schema usage) appear in GSC properties within the US on both mobile and desktop.
Reverse engineering when ‘translated results’ is triggered
An important part of the skillset of an SEO professional is the ability to reverse engineer when data is presented within Google Search Console and understanding the source of the data.
In the case of the ‘translated results’ Search Appearance filter, this is like other situations where reverse engineering as a skill is required. Similar to situations where you may receive a spike in impressions and need to do forensic work to discover the source, only to find out that a Twitter carousel is the culprit.
Alongside the Search Appearance tab, we have various bits of data available to us. This includes the query (most important), the page, the country data, and device type. As a note, you should only ever see the device type as ‘mobile’ within the device type tab at this time.
In the above screenshot from GSC, you can see that the vast majority of the impressions are coming from India. This is the same for the other properties I have access to that had the filter triggered. The difference with the above is that the data is also coming from an ‘Unknown Region’ and also from Turkey.
It is worth mentioning that having the ‘translated results’ snippet attached to your web page on mobile actually makes the result longer on Google (pushing the next result down slightly). However, the feature is opt in by default, with users not needing to do anything to obtain the snippet treatment.
You can however opt out of the translated-related features in Google Search by user the notranslate
directive, which results in Google not offering a translation of the page in their search results.
Final comments
To close off this article, I’ll be finishing with a summary of the main points covered that SEO professionals should be aware of as it relates to the ‘translated results’ Search Appearance filter. This includes:
- After launching in at the end of 2021, Google has only recently incorporate translated results as a measurable feature within Google Search Console in late April of 2022 at earliest.
- Along with other Search Appearance filters such as ‘AMP article’, the filter for ‘Translated results’ will now appear in the GSC Search Appearance report when relevant.
- Similar to how clicks and impressions are measured for other SERP features in GSC, an impression for a translated result will only be triggered if the drop-down is selected to show the title link and snippet in English.
- Translated results on mobile are opt in by default for all websites, similar to a feature such as Featured Snippets. But there are ways to prevent inclusion (same for Featured Snippets) if a site does not want their mobile results translated and have the Google Translate functionality enabled on their web page.
- To locate situations where your web page title link and snippet has been translated by Google, all of the clues you can find are within GSC. In particular, the query and location data for the page within the ‘translated results’ Search Appearance filter.
Overall, it is good to see that Google is expanding upon the list of Search Appearance features within their documentation and now seeing that reflected in search results.
When doing a Google search to find out more information on the filter, I wasn’t able to find anything, hence the creation of this article. If you have any insights that you’d like to share about the new filter, please feel free to ping me on Twitter.