Forum Moderators: open
Now, I have come across two versions of this tag:
<html lang="en-GB"> and
<html lang="en-UK">
obviously referring to "Great Britain" and the "United Kingdom".
Is any of the above versions incorrect? Which one will be better interpreted by browsers and search engines?
Is it advisable to also use one of the following meta tags?
<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en-gb">
<meta name="Language" content="en-UK">
My sites are hosted in Germany and I would like the correct version to come up when someone is restricting a search to German, English or Spanish content.
Laurenz
en-GBlanghtmlHowever, unless you are using several different versions of English (eg. US English, Canadian English), it is much better to just use the two-letter language code
enen-USen-GBSo
<html lang="en">
My web site is English primarilly, but has translations in 6 other languages, as subdirectories, e.g.:
the German is loacated:
www.acmewidget.com/deutschland/index.htm
In the html for the translated pages, I have (again using the German as an example):
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 //EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html lang="de">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="DE">
I realise the lang="de" and the meta all seem to do the same thing, but I haven't seen anything that suggested it was a 'no-no' to include both, so I did. BUT, we seem to have a THIRD (and incorrect) language reference in the very top line re the DocType - so, should this be DE as well? And that now makes three language references!
Advices?
The DTD language has nothing to do with the page's charset encoding or language meta tag.
sorry, but I have to disagree, Before coming here, I had a look at w3.org. That's how they see this:
8.1 Specifying the language of content: the lang attribute
Attribute definitions
lang = language-code [CI]
This attribute specifies the base language of an element's attribute values and text content. The default value of this attribute is unknown.
...
In this example, the primary language of the document is French ("fr"). One paragraph is declared to be in Spanish ("es"), after which the primary language returns to French. The following paragraph includes an embedded Japanese ("ja") phrase, after which the primary language returns to French.<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<HTML lang="fr">
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Un document multilingue</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
...Interpreted as French...
<P lang="es">...Interpreted as Spanish...
<P>...Interpreted as French again...
<P>...French text interrupted by<EM lang="ja">some
Japanese</EM>French begins here again...
</BODY>
</HTML>ht*p://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/dirlang.html
So, as I understand it, the language specified should be the language the main part of the document is in.
The question only is: how much precision is needed - and what is the correct way to tell a browser/spider that a page was written in British English?
Laurenz
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//[b]EN[/b]"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<HTML lang="[b]fr[/b]">
The "EN" in the doctype refers to the language of the DTD, not the language of the document. The "fr" refers to the document's language.
Mr Bo Jangles: your example looks fine: it is rather redundant to specify the language in a meta element when already specified on the
html
Could you give an example of how to declare language
in the HTTP server header?
I have a few pages translated into French and Spanish.
The first 2 lines of one of these read:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html lang="fr">
What exactly is the 'server header'?
I just now added the lan="fr">. Good advice!
What else do I need to do, and how?
- Larry
With HTTP 1.1, content negotiation of many kinds is possible between the user agent and the server (the server says 'I can give you English, Spanish and French', user agent says 'I prefer German and English', etc.) but many of these features are currently under-utilized. That's why I said it's a good idea, but it's certainly not a required step at present.
Also, you may not be able to change these headers if you are on shared hosting and have minimal access to server configuration. Although I currently know very little about PHP, I understand you can also set header information with this technology.
You can check your HTTP header information
on SearchEngineWorld, our sister site:
Server Header Checker [searchengineworld.com]
You can learn more about HTTP headers at the W3C
Header Field Definitions [w3.org]
I checked my header info on the link provided.
It all looks good to me, but nothing about language.
I presume I'm on a shared server, an inexpensive hosting account.
For now then, I presume that a line like <html lang="fr"> is sufficient.
Previously I just had <html>.
May I presume that <html> defaults to English, or should I add lang="en" to my many english pages?
Best - Larry
Will putting <html lang="fr"> into my French language pages actually help me in the SERPS for french terms?
I have a [topic] related site. If I Google for the English keyword, my pages start listing between #22 and #35.
If I Google for the french/spanish/italian word, I'm way out in the boondocks, 100th place or so.
Once lang="fr" and/of lang="es" kicks in, i.e. those
pages get crawled and re-indexed, might I expect better placement for the other languages?
Is there any reasonably good evidence that lang="xx" helps the SERPS of pages written in those languages?
Thanks again - Larry
[edited by: tedster at 7:16 am (utc) on Nov. 22, 2004]
[edit reason] remove specifics [/edit]
I have seen no evidence that a lang attribute helps in the SERPs for any language, but your description sounds quite suggestive. I'd say try it without making any other changes and let us know how your test turns out. You're in a good situation to discover something very easily.
