A translation widget will not get you found abroad
If your language button is an auto-translate widget, there is no English URL for Google to index. How we fixed our own site, plus a five-point check.
Our own website had an EN button. You pressed it and the screen turned English. But the button was an automatic translation widget, and there was not a single English page behind it.
We only looked at this properly once we had a page that needed to be seen abroad. On September 16, 2026, we spent a day rebuilding the structure. This is the record.
Why a translation widget does not show up in search
A translation widget changes the text on the same URL. The translation happens inside the browser when a visitor presses the button. workersaurus.com/about/ stays as it is, and an English …/en/about/ does not exist anywhere.
Search engines collect pages by URL. With no English URL there is nothing to collect as an English page. Google’s documentation says the same.
“Google recommends using different URLs for each language version of a page” — and not cookies or browser settings.
There is one more point. Google decides the language of a page from the visible content. The documentation states that it does not use lang attributes or the language code in the URL. A page that shows only Korean when it first loads is a Korean page.
What we changed on our own site
| Item | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| English URLs | None | One /en/… page for every Korean page |
| English copy | Machine translated on click | Written in English by a person |
| Language links | None | Both versions point at each other with hreflang |
| Sitemap | Korean URLs only | Alternate language links on every URL |
| Search and contact form | Always Korean | The language of the page you are on |
Japanese and Chinese are still automatic translation on our site. We use it knowing it is a convenience and not a way to be found. When we write those pages, the buttons become links.
Five checks for a multilingual site
Go through your current site in this order. None of it needs developer tools.
- Does the URL change when you switch language? If the address bar stays the same, it is a translation widget.
- Do the two versions point at each other? Search the page source for
hreflang. Google states that if two pages do not both point to each other, the tags are ignored. - Is there an
x-default? It is the fallback page when no language matches. - Are visitors forced to a language by country? Google advises against redirecting based on a guessed language. Crawlers get bounced the same way people do.
- Can visitors see a language link? They should be able to choose for themselves.
When a translation widget is fine
The widget is not a bad tool. It has a different job.
- It is enough when the goal is to help visitors who already arrived get the gist.
- It cannot be used to bring in new visitors from search.
- Sentences that must not be wrong, such as treatment guidance, should not be left to a widget.
For clinics the third point matters most. Procedure names, precautions and price notation are exactly where machine translation tends to fail.
Frequently asked questions
Will an automatic translation widget get us into English Google results?
No. There is no English URL. To appear in English results you need an English URL with English body text.
Can we publish machine-translated text as our English pages?
We do not recommend it. Google’s spam policies treat generating many pages without adding value for users as scaled content abuse. Even if a translator produces the first draft, have a person read and fix it before it goes live.
Does adding hreflang raise our rankings?
hreflang tells Google which language version to show. It is not described as something that raises rankings. What it does is reduce cases where an English speaker is shown the Korean page.
