httpwebwitch - 5:42 pm on Oct 23, 2012 (gmt 0)

This is not something I wanted to hear. I use appropriate lang attributes in my markup, perfectly according to the HTML spec, for translated versions of the same content at different URLs. For Google to ignore that and try to detect the language is ... rude?

I assume this is because too many webmasters use those lang attributes wrong, and Google finds them unreliable.

Oh well, I can just hope that my Spanish pages get identified as Spanish, and the French ones as French. My markup tells the real story. If Google gets it wrong, that's their problem to fix.

Hoping that Google gets things right is often the only shred of influence we have over representation in the SERPs.