If you want to add more languages to your site, you may consider automatically translating your content. While Google likely won’t penalize you for it, it’s probably not a good idea.
You can read more about this over on this post at Search Engine Roundtable.
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Over the years, a popular way to get more traffic to a website is to release versions of the site in different languages. It’s a solid idea, but there’s a big difference between a properly translated site and an automatically translated site.
A user named Tim asked Google’s John Mueller:
“If one translates their own content to different languages using “machine translation” (such as Google Translate) – would they get penalised for that?”
After some back and forth, John ended with: “I don’t think that would trigger manual actions, but if the translations are bad, then it’s bad content in general :). However, machine translation is much much better than it used to be. Another option: noindex until reviewed by local users / speakers”
You’re not likely to get penalized in any case, but the last bit of that seems to make the most sense. Go ahead and have your site automatically translated, but hide those pages from Google with a noindex. For those users, something is better than nothing.
Over time, as you’re able to get those pages proofread and updated by a native speaker, you can slow un-noindex them so Google can begin to show them in the rankings.
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