Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
is it possible to get a website penalized for just one language?
We operate a 3 language travel website. Each language has the the same page structure and number of pages. English and spanish are doing fine, but the german pages in most cases, are either not ranked or worse, not indexed at all although we do maintain a sitemap file. A few pages in german obtain top 5 rankings, but in the majority somewhere between 20 and 60.
The german pages used to rank well, too. But some 9 or 10 months ago I made a stupid mistake for Google to consider these pages duplicate content.
The other, possibly duplicate content, has been deleted months ago already, but the german pages don't regain any rankings. I have done several changes to the pages to improve ranking, but things won't move at all. No increase or decrease neither.
What I would like to know? Is it possible that a website gets penalized for 1 language out of 3? If not, and the problem is related to the possible duplicate content, how long does it take to recover from this. Or is it even necessary to forget about the old pages and recreate them as a whole new structure?
Thank you very much for your help
best regards
Sascha
the structure is like this:
/german_product/german_product_destination.html
/english_product/english_product_destination.html
/spanish_product/spanish_product_destination.html
no different subdomains.
The metatags declare the different languages using this following tag.
<META NAME="Content-Language" CONTENT="de"> for german
Hope this is precise enough.
best regards
Sascha
Guess it takes time...
