aakk9999 - 3:09 am on Oct 24, 2012 (gmt 0)

I had and still occassionally have a huge problem with this. What I have found out is that if you have a site in English that is targetting visitors worldwide, but where the business has locally based brick and mortar office and the website also has reasonable local traffic, Google suddenly decides that the page is in the local language.

Being it on ccTLD domain makes it even worse - Google just does not want to believe it is in English if your ccTLD is from non-english country and you are based in the non-english country, regardless of how good the English language on the page is and even if there is a no single foreign word on the page.

This is a big problem in tourism niche when you are located in a particular country and are targetting audience worldwide.

I have also found out that when Google gets language wrong and an english page gets "Translate this page" when searched in english Google, then your ranking drop few spots - almost as Google takes away a bit of relevance.

I have not noticed this to be a problem with other languages other than English / Local language combination. Most of sites I look after are multilingual with "home language" being English, but only English language has this problem (Google deciding it is not English).

I have found that the workaround for internal pages is to have language folder in URL (e.g. www.example.com/en/about-wigets )- this seem to work for internal pages and Google is less likely to get it wrong. But if the home page is in English, and your brick and mortar address is (lets say) in Italy and you have a significant number of Italians clicking on your home page (which is in English) then Google often gets it wrong and declares the page to be in Italian.

I also found out that geotargetting the site to "Unlisted" seemed to help with home page language recognition.