French terminology

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French terminology

What is the effect in text?

duhboy

11:29 am on Jul 24, 2002 (gmt 0)

Hello all,
The home page of one of my commercial sites has both English and French text in the body of the page.
This is considered to be important as the site originates in Quebec, Canada.
Like many sites in Canada, there is a division between the two languages beyond the home page.
My question(finally) is this. Will S/E's(specifically Google)have problems with this?
Will the French terminology be treated as spelling errors?
Any advice offered is very much appreciated.
Thanks in advance, Duhboy.:)

vitaplease

11:47 am on Jul 24, 2002 (gmt 0)

duhboy,

I do not know about other search engines, but try searching in google for "français" (with c-cédille), it works ok.

Google can have troubles showing the proper pagerank in the toolbar when using the exact c-cédille in the url name though:

[webmasterworld.com...]

google prefers "fran%C3%A7ais" to "ç" url spelling ;)

misosoph

12:25 pm on Jul 24, 2002 (gmt 0)

Are you using language tags?

If the rules haven't changed recently, language tags can go lots of places: <html lang="en"> .

<html="en"> In this case the default language of the document is "en", but that can be temporarily over-ridden by a tag (Be sure to close the tag if you want to return to the default language, e.g. .) There is no </lang> tag.

These help with speech readers (Accessibility). I don't know if they also help search engine robots. Does anyone?

Macguru

2:49 pm on Jul 24, 2002 (gmt 0)

Hi duhboy

I am from Québec too. Welcome around here!

I see very often bilingual sites, and I think it is a common mistake.

For one, a home page with both languages is better than one with no text at all. Especially if the words where carefully chosen.

I split bilingual sites in 2 domains. You get domain.ca for French and domain.com for English. Then I link both sites together from many pages.

It's just a guess, but I think both humans and search engines like it better. I believe the "theme" of a site is stronger if it is written in a single language. Seems to me that any site with a main keyword as "potato" should have "potato" written at least once on every pages. With a bilingual site you get "patate" written on half of them. So you dilute the site's value on search engines using "themes".

I am pretty sure both sites will benefit from linking to each other.