TITLE: We Published the Same Article in Four Languages on the Same Day: Here’s What Each One Did
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Translating an article into four languages sounds like quadrupling your reach. We tested it with a real article on a real site and measured it in Search Console with no sugarcoating. This is the tally at 21 days, and it’s less flashy than the presentations promise.
The Test
On September 21, 2026, we published “Why the American Investor Is Still Looking at Cancún in 2026” on inversionesdemexico.com: 907 words in Spanish, with data on visitors, foreign investment, and property appreciation. That same day, at the same time, its versions in English, Portuguese, and French went live, linked to each other with the hreflang tags that tell Google which is which.
There was no special promotion and no purchased links. This is the site’s normal procedure: finished article, translated, paired, and published. We measured from September 21 to October 11, the latest period Search Console had closed when we checked on October 13.
What Each Version Did
- Spanish: 1 impression, 0 clicks. It happened on September 22, at position 4. It never showed again in the following 19 days.
- English: 0 impressions, 0 clicks.
- Portuguese: 0 impressions, 0 clicks.
- French: 0 impressions, 0 clicks.
Across the four languages, someone saw the article on a results page exactly once in three weeks. Nobody clicked.
Indexing Was Different in Each Language
Using Search Console’s URL Inspection, we checked the status of each version on October 13:
- Spanish: indexed, last crawled October 10. Almost three weeks after publication.
- English: indexed, last crawled October 5.
- Portuguese: indexed, last crawled October 7.
- French: “Discovered – currently not indexed.” Google knows it exists and hasn’t crawled it yet.
That’s the first lesson: publishing in four languages is not the same as being indexed in four languages. The original version, which has the most signals, took almost three weeks to be crawled again. The French one is still in the queue. If you measure a translated article after three days and conclude that it “doesn’t work,” you may be measuring a page Google hasn’t even opened.
It Wasn’t an Isolated Case
So as not to rest a conclusion on a single article, we reviewed two other articles from the same site that went out in all four languages:
- An article on Cancún’s alert level (September 18): in three weeks, only the French version showed up, with 2 impressions at an average position of 3.5 and no clicks. Spanish, English, and Portuguese got none.
- Seven reasons to invest in Playa del Carmen (September 22): the English version earned 3 impressions at an average position of 24, and the French one earned 1 at position 91. Spanish and Portuguese got none.
The pattern repeats: single-digit numbers, no clicks, and a different language peeking out each time. There’s no winning language. What we have is a site with little authority in each language and articles that were just born.
The Context: How Each Language Is Doing Across the Whole Site
To find out whether one article’s result was normal or just bad luck, we added up the pages with at least one impression, by language, across all of inversionesdemexico.com for the same period (September 21 to October 11). This also includes older articles:
- Spanish: 78 pages with impressions, 325 impressions, and 6 clicks.
- English: 60 pages, 280 impressions, and 3 clicks.
- French: 32 pages, 114 impressions, and 0 clicks.
- Portuguese: 8 pages, 10 impressions, and 0 clicks.
Two things stand out. English, with almost the same visibility as Spanish, is the language that has already earned its place. And Portuguese barely exists for Google yet, with eight visible pages. A language is built page by page and measured per language, not “the site as a whole.”
What This Measurement Doesn’t See
Search Console only counts what happens on Google. It doesn’t capture visits that arrive from Bing, from an AI search engine, from a link someone pasted into a chat, or from the social networks where we share each article. That’s why we talk about visibility on Google, not total readers: an article with zero impressions may have had visits through other channels. What is true is that, as far as Google is concerned, these three weeks passed almost blank.
What We Can Conclude and What We Can’t
With 21 days, you can’t conclude that translating is pointless. With 21 days, you can conclude this:
- Translation doesn’t bring traffic on its own, or fast. On a site that’s young in each language, the first weeks are about indexing, not visits.
- Each language is measured separately. Mixing all four into a single number hides the fact that one is indexed, another is half-indexed, and another hasn’t been opened.
- The useful timeframe is long. Titles and listings show results in weeks; a new page in a new language usually takes one to three months to settle, and sometimes more. That’s a rough range: it depends on the site’s authority and the competition for that search.
- What you can see right away is the technical side. That the hreflang is correct, that each version is its own URL, and that crawling reaches it. You can verify all of that on day one.
How to Measure a Translated Article, Step by Step
- In Search Console, open Performance and filter by page using “URL contains” and the language prefix (/en/, /pt/, /fr/). Spanish has no prefix.
- Paste each version’s URL into URL Inspection. Check whether it says “indexed” or “discovered, not indexed.” They’re different problems.
- Record impressions, clicks, and position by language on day 7, day 30, and day 60. A single reading tells you nothing.
- If a version isn’t indexed after 30 days, request indexing from the tool itself and check that internal links point to it.
- Don’t translate by volume. Translate first what already ranks in its original language: that’s where there’s proven demand.
What We’ll Do With This Experiment
The article turns 30 days old on October 21. We’ll repeat the measurement that day, with the same queries and the same method, and we’ll publish whatever comes out even if it’s still zero. A well-measured negative result is worth more than a success story without numbers.
If you have a multilingual site and don’t know which of your versions are indexed and which only exist in the menu, checking takes an afternoon. Get in touch and we’ll prepare a table by language showing what Google has actually crawled.
Google Search Console data for inversionesdemexico.com, September 21 to October 11, 2026, retrieved on October 13; indexing statuses are from the URL Inspection on that date. Figures change daily, and impression data lags by about two days. Settling timeframes are approximate and vary by site and by search.
Versión en español: Publicamos el mismo artículo en cuatro idiomas el mismo día: qué hizo cada uno
