Googlebot crawled my site and thinks it's the wrong language

Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi

Message Too Old, No Replies

Googlebot crawled my site and thinks it's the wrong language

Makaveli2007

12:48 am on Dec 26, 2007 (gmt 0)

Hello,

I had put my firs site up, but didnt have any links pointing to it. However Googlebot found my site (using registrar data?) right at the beginning (I only found out a month later).

The problem is I didnt expect that site to get crawled and had content (a few words) in German on it (my mother tongue). However I want the site to be in English.

Will this be a problem with Google? I was told on another forum that I should use modrewrite (but have no knowledge of that).

What can I do to make sure Google understands my site is in English not German? Do I really have to do something?

Im in college and its exam time at the moment (for the next month). Could it cause any (additional) trouble, in case I do not 'fix' this issue as soon as possible?

thank you

[edited by: encyclo at 1:19 am (utc) on Dec. 26, 2007]
[edit reason] specifics [/edit]

encyclo

1:03 am on Dec 26, 2007 (gmt 0)

Googlebot is likely to work things out properly over time, however you should start by defining the document language on all pages:

<html [b]lang="en"[/b]>

Makaveli2007

1:17 am on Dec 26, 2007 (gmt 0)

I thought this should do, too. However at that other forum I was told about modrewrite just to make sure..or something..unfortunately I couldnt ask again, because the forum went down ;(.

Is modrewrite something I have to care about in this situation or can I just do what you said and then later just check if Google ranks the site for the right language?

encyclo

1:21 am on Dec 26, 2007 (gmt 0)

mod_rewrite will help if you are changing the page names (URLs), but otherwise it won't be useful in this situation. The two aspects you mention - a brand-new site and close to zero content - probably mean that this is a non-problem, just give it some time, add some content in the right language and declare the language in the markup.

SEOPTI

2:34 am on Dec 26, 2007 (gmt 0)

Google Webmaster Tools is your friend.