Google language skills

does café mean coffee or coffeeshop

[ulstrup]

If no language codes are in the header, how far does Google go in "understanding" other languages than english?

I.e: coffee in english is café in both French and Spanish. Café means coffeeshop in Danish and so on...

Does language codes in header matter for better results on local Google serps?

I see Danish sites listed as being Dutch and english pages penetrading serps in non-english languages on local language searches.

[willamowius]

As far as I can tell, Google ignores all HTML language tags (lang=xy) and also the HTTP (or http-equiv) Content-Language header.

They purely look for keywords.

Does anybody have an idea how to make Google see the most important language of a page?

[ulstrup]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld willamowius!

As far as I can tell, Google ignores all HTML language tags (lang=xy) and also the HTTP (or http-equiv) Content-Language header.

I think you are right. How about the ISO standard http-equiv? I think it may be used by Google.

[willamowius]

I'm pretty sure they ignore that also.

I have English navigation on all pages and the content of some pages is in other languages.
For those pages I set <meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="xy"> and they still get misrecognized if the foreign lagnuage content is too short compared with the navigation.

[heini]

Hi Willamowius - welcome to the board!

I guess you are right about Google not caring for language tags.
We had a very interesting discussion a while back here on this very topic:
[webmasterworld.com...]

What I can add to that however is that I seem to see an increasing error ratio from Google in this regard.