google and multiple languages

Forum Moderators: phranque

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google and multiple languages

0biwan

3:11 am on Dec 30, 2009 (gmt 0)

Hi,

I have a site, example.com with has no sub domains for languages. so it is always example.com, but according to the country it shows the site in portuguese or eng.
even the pages have all the same name except the news and foruns

the problem is that in google i can only find portuguese version of it!
how can I make to google index the english version?

thanks a lot

[edited by: phranque at 6:19 am (utc) on Dec. 30, 2009]
[edit reason] exemplified domains [/edit]

phranque

6:42 am on Dec 30, 2009 (gmt 0)

welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com], 0biwan!

even the pages have all the same name

this is your problem.
each page must have its own url.
although it is technically possible to serve different content for the same url using content negotiation, ip delivery or other means, the search engines' basic unit of identity is the url. (thanks for that phrase, jdMorgan!)
if the language of the content is different, it is a different page and therefore must be a different url.

as far as explaining why google only finds the portuguese version of the page depends on your method for detecting "location" and serving english content.

0biwan

1:22 pm on Dec 30, 2009 (gmt 0)

so, without changing it there is no chance to google find the english content? :S

phranque

10:25 pm on Dec 31, 2009 (gmt 0)

there is no way google will index two sets of content for one url.
depending on how you do location detection you can probably force that one version to be english rather than portuguese.

0biwan

6:50 pm on Jan 1, 2010 (gmt 0)

it is mabe by ip so I presume that google have bots on each country.
I will have a different domain for english version and i think taht the problem will be solved