Indexing in Wrong Language

Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi

Message Too Old, No Replies

Indexing in Wrong Language

google is indexing my pages but detecting the wrong on-page language.

lukewd

9:16 pm on Nov 21, 2007 (gmt 0)

my site has about 1720 pages currently indexed in google. all pages are written in English, but some have product names in foreign languages. all content (apart from product name) is in English.

now is i do an advanced search, with the site operator, and return only results in the English language, i have only about 63 pages indexed.

this leads me to the presumption that the other 1650 odd are being detected in languages other that English. this is confirmed by doing site searches in different languages, which are showing results for those languages.

now i know everyone says meta tags are dead, but how else can i inform google of the correct language that my site is written in.

this is a concern for me, as my site is targeted towards the uk, and i notice that google.co.uk often only returns results in the english language.

can anyone offer any advice or points of view?

jimbeetle

9:50 pm on Nov 21, 2007 (gmt 0)

That's a bit weird, but since Google's been known to be weird at times, you might want to see if the lang attribute [w3.org] helps. It can be set on any element, but for your purposes...

<html lang="en">

...should work.

For the product names you can do something along the lines of:

Here's some text talking about this Produit

conor

10:22 pm on Nov 21, 2007 (gmt 0)

Hosting the Site on a UK IP or using a .co.uk domain should make sure you are included in the .co.uk index.

If you have a 'foreign' TLD or you are hosting outside of the UK this could explain your issue.

lukewd

11:18 pm on Nov 21, 2007 (gmt 0)

hi guys,

thanks very much for your input.

just to clarify:

already have html tag attribute in place: <html lang="en">
already have the language meta-tag: <meta http-equiv="content-language" content="en">
have just added the Content-Language server header.
site is hosted in the UK, with a .com TLD.
have specifed the desired target country in google webmaster tools.
whois info is UK address.

so basically its already pretty optimised for geographic search ranking.

the one thing i have not yet tried is adding the lang attribute to the actual line which contains the product name in a different language, but will do this next.
eg. spanish product name

to be honest, i'm not sure if the fact the google is obviously detecting the wrong language on the document level (not domain level), is actually having any impact on my ranking. any thoughts here?

but just in case it is, i want to do everthing possible to try to set it to the correct language, as 95% of our business is from the UK.

jomaxx

11:23 pm on Nov 21, 2007 (gmt 0)

I have tons of foreign language content embedded in my English-language pages and use the content-language tag, and more or less all pages show up when searching for pages written in English.

It's worth noting that some individual pages ALSO show up when searching for pages in French or whatever, even if they also show up when searching for pages in English.

Vimes

4:32 am on Nov 22, 2007 (gmt 0)

I�ve noticed a trend on pages that don�t have a huge amount of content so it could also be down to percentage of text on the page.

i.e. the bot places the page in both indices, English and the other so ignoring the attribute and meta statements due to the content percentages.

Vimes.