language versions

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language versions

how to tell Google my site has two versions: english and spanish

agonzalez

1:59 pm on Jul 22, 2003 (gmt 0)

my website has two versions: english and spanish with thosands of pages each of them. The only difference is the language. How can i show google this? I have them in subdomains.

I use metas like this
<meta name="DC.Language" scheme="RFC1766" content="en-US" />

is this the right way?

some expecience? will google punish me because a lot of pages seem the same?

mipapage

2:28 pm on Jul 22, 2003 (gmt 0)

DC.language was not made for telling Google or anything in the browser realm about the language of your website.

Off topic - I see this used on so many websites, in particular some SEO companies (local) and their clients. Was this a way of stuffing keywords in the past or is Dublin Core that important to so many?

What you want is something like this:

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="es" lang="es">

on your Spanish pages, and 'en' instead of 'es' on your English pages.

This is but one example, and I use this on pages that are declared (and written) as (x)html (not sure if it's different for plain old html).

I searched here at WebmasterWorld and found this thread [webmasterworld.com] on Doctype declarations which mentions a bit on languages.

As for Google, it shouldn't punish you for this.