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yves1 - 1:23 pm on May 12, 2006 (gmt 0)
Suddently, although I made no change to the page and did not move the host, Google added a [Translate this page] link to it in its SERPs. Obviously Google now considers this page as written in French. The immediate consequence was a drop of ranking of this page in the google.com SERPs for a search in English, and a lift of ranking in Google France, google.fr (for a search in French or in English). Background information: The only thing that changed is that in its continuous backlinks development process, the site gained most of it backlinks from sites hosted in France and written in French. So far my conclusion would be that these French backlinks are the cause of the changed observed in Google. Unless Google has changed its criteria for language classification. Or maybe it is just a(nother) Google bug;)
I have exactly the same problem with one of my pages. It is written in English, its html tag says <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">, its meta desxcription and keyword tags say lang="en", and until 2 months ago, Google used to consider it as a page written in English.
- The site is hosted in France
- Most of the pages of this site are written in French
- The home + another page of this site are listed in the French section of Dmoz.
I suspected that all of these 3 factors, could influence the fact that Google now sees this page as "in French". But none of these 3 factors changed.