Google keeps trying to translate my English pages to English

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Google keeps trying to translate my English pages to English

boydie

10:26 am on Jan 23, 2007 (gmt 0)

Sorry if this is the wrong forum, please move if there is a more suitable one

Hi, My english language travel site had been acheiving top ten rankings for years for many location specific keywords e.g Spain Holiday Deals. Then about 3 months ago i started to notice our rankings drop but only for non english speaking countries
Google had started to show a "translate this page" option beside our listings. So it would offer to translate our English language page about Spain from Spanish to English - which of course makes no sense as the page is NOT in spanish

I assumed this had something to do with our drop in rankings so added the tag <HTML lang="en"> to each page so google would read the pages in english and not try and translate them.

3 months on and Google still shows the "translate this page" option and our rankings continue to drop

any ideas on what i could i do to get google to stop trying to translate the pages and realise they are in ENGLISH?

mattg3

11:58 am on Jan 23, 2007 (gmt 0)

Google's geotargeting and Language recognition is a joke. They decide by reasons unknown to man that an English website should be served mainly to Germany ... based on ISP data .. or whatever made sense on that day..

g1smd

12:01 pm on Jan 23, 2007 (gmt 0)

Try adding the language meta tag too, just for the hell of it.

Make sure you also have a character set declaration to help things along too.

boydie

1:14 pm on Jan 23, 2007 (gmt 0)

Thanks guys, added the language tag a few months ago and tht charachter set as well. this is driving me nuts. something so simple that i just cant find a solution for..my heads on the block here :-(