Problem with Multi-lingual Pages

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Problem with Multi-lingual Pages

Should we tell Google which languages we use?

jgar

8:26 am on Sep 18, 2002 (gmt 0)

We have a site in 5 languages. Pages in English are well-indexed, but pages written in French, German, Italian and Spanish are not very well indexed, and foreign characters are not always reproduced well in Google search results.

Does Google prefer english to other languages?

I've done some thinking and wondered what you guys think of these possible solutions:

1) META TAGS
Can we write a Meta Tag to help us get better indexed with foreign language pages?

2) HTML TAG
Would it also/instead be useful to use something like <HTML lang=fr> for (in this case) French pages?

3) FOREIGN DOMAIN NAME
For the French pages, for example, would it be better just to get <website name>.fr?

Any other solutions?

Thanks for any comments.

eyeinthesky

8:53 am on Sep 18, 2002 (gmt 0)

I've got the same problem so I submitted the foreign pages to the foreign based Google search engines accordingly, ie to submit French pages go to : [google.fr...]

Not sure how it will turn out, though.

Cheers.

heini

9:15 am on Sep 18, 2002 (gmt 0)

Jgar - the ideal solution would probably be to separate the languages, putting up separate domains, promoting and submitting them in their respective countries.
But that's not cheap and takes a lot of work.

Alternatively you could set up subdomains for each language.

I would not mix languages anyhow in one domain. Seperate them as best as you can.

You should in any case set the appropriate meta tags for each language.

Hi eyeinthesky welcome to the board!
Submitting to Google sites is not neccessary, and submitting to local Google sites does not make any difference to submitting at main Google.
If your pages are well linked, Google will find them.

conor

9:22 am on Sep 18, 2002 (gmt 0)

Like Heini, I would recommend subdomains. I ahve several multilingual sites and have implimented this approach across the board. The english sites always get far more traffic but in time the other languages do produce a godd yield if you work at it.

jgar

10:11 am on Sep 18, 2002 (gmt 0)

Thanks for your comments guys.

When you say "subdomains", how do I set these up?
Do they inherit the PR ranking of the original site?

Cheers, Jgar

Eric_Jarvis

12:33 pm on Sep 18, 2002 (gmt 0)

we have 14 languages...they are in directories of a single domain...Google has picked up all of them within a few weeks of them going live and they pretty much all have PR 7 for the index page

we get significantly more traffic for the combined translated pages than we do for English...at least half as much again...in fact Spanish is not all that far behind English...German, Arabic, Chinese, French, Portuguese, and Japanese all have a massive amount of use...Dutch, Danish and Finnish all make a significant contribution...I'm struggling to promote Russian and Hungarian...Italian only just went live and Swahili won't be up until later this week

make sure you have marked the pages up correctly for character set and language...and submit each language separately to the correct language version of Google and where possible dmoz...I don't bother submitting to Google in English, I let googlebot find us, but for the translated pages I've found it to be useful

jgar

12:51 pm on Sep 18, 2002 (gmt 0)

Thanks for that Eric

When you say:

"make sure you have marked the pages up correctly for character set and language"

How do you do this. Character Sets, I assume, can be set using the Meta Tag.

But how do you set the language?
Can this also be done in a meta tag?
How do you do it?

Would appreciate a reply.

Jgar

Rumbas

1:26 pm on Sep 18, 2002 (gmt 0)

We get good results adding a meta language tag:

Where "dk" is substituted with the right language identifier.

The engines are pretty good at picking the right language, however having several languages on the same site can cause some hick ups once in a while. By pointing the engine to right way by using the meta language, wont hurt you.

Getting good local directory registrations also seems to help the engines locate your language.

heini

1:34 pm on Sep 18, 2002 (gmt 0)

Right,
<meta http-equiv="Content-language" content="[country-identifier]">
for the language,
plus the correct charset, like this for example:
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">