Spanish, English and German: getting a Gran Canaria website right

The three ways this gets done badly

1. The Google Translate widget. A dropdown that machine-translates the page in the browser. It looks like a solution and it isn't one: search engines index the original page only, so you never appear in a German search, and the output is the kind of Spanish-to-German that makes a reader distrust the business before they've read the prices.

2. One page, three languages stacked. Everything in Spanish, then the same thing in English underneath, then German. Search engines can't tell which language the page is in, so it ranks well in none of them, and every visitor scrolls past two thirds of a page written for somebody else.

3. Three separate websites. Three domains, three hosting bills, three sets of content that drift apart until the German one still has last year's prices.

What actually works

A separate URL per language. /es/, /en/, /de/. Each one a real page that a search engine can index in its own right, in its own language.

hreflang tags between them. This is the part that's almost always missing. The tags tell a search engine "these three URLs are the same page in different languages" — which is how a German searcher lands on the German version rather than the Spanish one, and how you avoid the three pages competing with each other.

One place to edit all three. Your content editor should show you the same page in three tabs, so when the price changes you change it three times in one sitting instead of remembering six months later that the German one is wrong.

Language chosen, not guessed. Auto-redirecting by IP is a well-meaning mistake: it sends the German tourist standing in Las Palmas to the Spanish page and gives them no visible way back. Offer the choice, remember it, don't force it.

Which languages you should actually publish

Not all three, necessarily. The rule is simple and it's about support, not translation:

Publish a language you can answer an email in.

A German-language page wins you the German search — and then a German enquiry arrives in your inbox and you can't answer it. You've converted a good ranking into a bad experience. So be honest about the setup:

• If someone on your team speaks German, publish German. It's the least contested, highest-value audience on this island and nobody good is fighting for it.
• If not, publish Spanish and English and serve German speakers in English. Most German business owners and long-stay visitors here operate in English comfortably. It isn't ideal, but it's honest, and honest converts better than a page that can't follow through.

That's the choice I've made on my own site, for exactly that reason: I work in Spanish and English, so those are the two languages you'll find here. Adding German to a site that's built this way is a small job — but the words have to come from someone who can stand behind them.

What this costs you to get wrong

Nothing visible. That's the problem. A site with no hreflang doesn't break, it just quietly never appears in a German search, and you'll never know what you didn't get.

Which is why it's worth checking, and checking takes minutes. Send me the address of your site and I'll tell you what a search engine currently sees: whether the hreflang tags are there at all, whether they point at the right pages, and which of your languages are actually indexed. No charge and no pitch — if the setup is already right, that's a two-line email and you can stop wondering about it.

Jean Ayala — web development in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. Fast, multilingual sites for businesses on the island. This site runs in Spanish and English.