Is the Google Translate widget bad for a business website that wants international traffic?

A JavaScript dropdown translation widget translates text only in the visitor's browser, so Google's crawlers do not see the translated text. That means you get zero organic search traffic from international markets. Seatext's Website Translation Agent serves translated HTML on clean subfolders with hreflang markup, making the content indexable. For a business that wants foreign visitors from search, a server-side approach is safer.