nikhilrajr - 7:53 am on Oct 24, 2012 (gmt 0)

Here is my experience with language. The problem I see with lots of websites is with the use of canonical tag. Ok I have 5 home pages each offering different language..
http://www.example.com/ - the main home page
http://www.example.com/?lang=en_EU
http://www.example.com/?lang=en_GB
http://www.example.com/?lang=de
http://www.example.com/?lang=fr
http://www.example.com/?lang=ja
Please see what Google says about Canonical tag [support.google.com...]

Google clearly says:
“The rel="canonical" attribute should be used only to specify the preferred version of many pages with identical content“

In all these pages the canonical tag points to http://www.example.com/ - english (US) version. How can http://www.example.com/?lang=en and http://www.example.com/?lang=de serve the same content?

What happens is Google might ignore all the other home pages and just show http://www.example.com/ - english (US) version in all the Google(US, UK, DE, FR) searches.
The best option is to use canonical tag in conjunction with alternate link tag See [support.google.com...]

But still it's a mystery [searchengineland.com...]

"The best practice is to place languages in subdirectory or subfolder rather than language parameter to help search engines more easily understand site structure." From this Google Webmaster video [youtube.com...] at 12:00 minutes

Having subfolder like http://www.example.com/de will help in verifying the German site and setting its geographic target in GWT to Germany.