Language Meta Tags and Google

Also, problem with Japanese content on English language site

[alejandroulloa]

I am the web master of a language school in the south of spain. We are very well ranked in google... the site has been growing and know the web is in 6 diff. languages. My question is: if I start to put language meta tags inside the diff. pages will this change my ranking. My second question is... google japan has never indexed my site since we did the japanes web portion of the site - what can i do?
Thank you

[g1smd]

Language tags are sometimes a help to online translation tools, so add them anyway. I doubt that your rankings will change much, if at all. Perhaps you should try it and then report back a few times in the next few months what has happened.

Bookmark this thread.

Do you also declare the character set, by using the Content-Type meta tag? You should do this. If you have not done this, then maybe Google is not seeing the content in the way that it should?

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="ja">

[alejandroulloa]

Thanks! what about for the other languages like English, Spanish, French etc...same character set as the jap. or it would change to charset=iso-8859-1?

[g1smd]

Western Europe can use ISO-8859-1 but UTF-8 is OK too.

There are specific encodings for Chinese, Chinese traditional, Chinese simplifed, Japanese, Thai, Korean, and many others.

There can be problems with character support within some browsers. Mozilla seems to come with good support in the basic installed version.

UTF-8 will be the best long term solution, but still a little while away from that being completely universal. May that day come a little sooner.

Supporting links from one web page with one encoding to another web page using another encoding for the filename can sometimes cause problems.

[takagi]

Only use 'UTF-8' if the page is really in Unicode, some other encodings found on Japanese pages are:

• Shift_JIS (or x-sjis)
• euc-jp
• iso-2022-jp

[alejandroulloa]

thank you all for your help on this topic... I will let you guys know through a post if this will help my site to be listed in google japan. :-) Gracias!

[alejandroulloa]

Well - boys and girls IT WORK! its actually magic! we not only come out in google but we have a very good ranking!
Thank you to all!

One more thing - We just got the page translated to Bahasa - which language tags would it use?

Always asking!
:-)

[g1smd]

Codes for Languages: ISO 639

Codes for Countries: ISO 3166

Codes for Currencies: ISO 4217

Formats for Date and Time: ISO 8601

[alejandroulloa]

Ok so what you are telling me is:

<META content="text/html; charset=iso-ISO 639" http-equiv=Content-Type>

Excuese my ignorance how would I use the country and currency tags?

:-)

Gracias