How Does Google Handle More than One Language on a Page?

[tedster]

Some useful comments on the challenge of publishing content in more than one language - from Google's JohnMu via that Google Webmaster forums.

In general, we recommend sticking to a single language per page. If you have multi-lingual content on your website, I'd recommend using separate pages per language. Our language recognition tries to find the most relevant language from your content, so that we can send you users searching in that language. Having the language in the URL... is a great way to make the language of the pages clear to users, so if you can do that, it might make sense (Google determines the language based on the content, so it's not necessary for us).

[google.com...]

[tedster]

There have been occasion reports here of language problems with Google's automatied language detection - where they offer to translate an English page into English, showing that they think the page content is in some other language.

Has anyone been able to find the cause and the fix for this? Is it still happening?

[emor8t]

I've found that Google' traffic numbers for non-English phrases just don't seem to line up. Keywords that generate ten's of thousands of monthly searches generate nothing when translated - and have asked people to make sure the translation is correct and the phrase(s) that are being used still make sense.

In other words, in North America, "Widget" generates X0,000 searches via the adwords tool, and in France "widget" generates X0,000 searches, but the french translation of "widget" generates 0, even trying to find a similar word, like "gizmo" generates results in English, but nothing in French.

I haven't really probed this deep yet but I just can't imagine this is the case, unless I'm "doing it wrong" - and Google insight reveals similar scenarios. I'm thinking I'm doing something wrong or Google's having a hang up somewhere and that the "0" figures are invalid.