Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I bought a domain from another company and created an English website. The problem is that in google.com search my home page has a (Translate This Page) link. The translation is from French to English. I checked and there are a few French websites linking to the home page.
Will this hurt my rankings in google.com since Google thinks my site is French? If so then is there a way to force a page in the index to English?
just change the hl= parameter from 'en' to 'fr' in the SERP (e.g. [google.com...] ) or add a &hl=en to your query and you'll see that your rankings are way better but google speaks french. This means that you only get top rankings for people searching with the french language interface and all the others (including from your english speaking target group) will see less optimal rankings. Google heavily reranks the SERPs depending on the users selected language even when he doesn't select the 'show results in language x' button.
just make sure that google identifies the language of your site correctly, as your rankings will be way below the optimum otherwise.
iPo
ou could try adding lang="en" or lang="en-US" to your top <html> tag. This specifies that the content of the page is English. It's on the w3.org site. happy!
The only difference between the pages (apart from actually having content in different languages) is the lang attribute to the html tag:
<html xml:lang="en">
<html xml:lang="sv">
