I have a couple of multilingual sites that I’m managing, and I’m having some issues getting good Google search results for all the languages.
Site 1. The folder structure is as follows:
Top level
Home English (index.html)
Home Catalan (index-ca.html)
Home Spanish (index-es.html)
At the top level I have three folders where all my other pages live:
en - All my English language pages are here
ca - All my Catalan language pages are here
es - all my Spanish language pages are here
We get great Google results for our English site (usually number 1!), but the equivalent searches in Catalan and Spanish are awful.
Here the English results are again great, and the Catalan and Spanish results are normally down on pages 5-6. This is an improvement over my first example above, but still not ideal.
Does anyone have any experience they’d like to share? How can I get great Google results in all three languages? Thanks!
Hi Derek,
Are you setting the language for the pages using the 3rd tab in the Inspector palette? I’m not sure if search engines like Google pick up on these settings but declaring the language the page uses (I would imagine) would certainly help.
There are some good tips on the W3C site where they discuss best practices or declaring languages for pages, page-parts and links amongst other things; http://www.w3.org/TR/i18n-html-tech-lang/#ri20030510.102829377
Regards,
Tim.
On 27 Dec 2011, at 19:35, derekzinger wrote:
Does anyone have any experience they’d like to share? How can I get great Google results in all three languages? Thanks!
Thanks for your reply. Yes, I have set meta tags for language on each of my pages, but I haven’t added an html attribute for text processing language. Judging from the article at the link you posted, it couldn’t hurt.
The original poster mentions an “HTML Language” action he uses to insert this attribute, but I can’t seem to find this action anywhere. I can always insert the attribute as markup, but an action would be preferable. Does it still exist? Thanks!
It does exist. It was written by Paul Dunning but doesn’t appear on his site. Tim—gentleman and scholar that he is—found it in his backups and passed it on to me.
For others looking for the HTML Language action, reply to this thread and I can send it to you (assuming Paul doesn’t mind).
Also, if anyone has other tips or tricks for multilingual SEO, please do share!
It does exist. It was written by Paul Dunning but doesn’t appear on his site. Tim—gentleman and scholar that he is—found it in his backups and passed it on to me.
For others looking for the HTML Language action, reply to this thread and I can send it to you (assuming Paul doesn’t mind).
Also, if anyone has other tips or tricks for multilingual SEO, please do share!
I hope this will improve the situation. But did it ever cross your mind that the content you offer is just more popular in English? My website also has two languages (one level of articles in two languages) and the English articles just score MUCH better.
If I want to search something on internet and have the biggest chance to find it, my first choice would also be English.
DTP2, that’s an interesting theory, and I like how, if true, it would get me off the hook!
However, if I understand properly, Google filters its results by language. Thus when I search in Catalan, English results don’t appear at all. When we show up on page 8, that’s only compared to other pages in Catalan, not all pages on the internet. You see what I mean?
Have you been publishing in English longer than you have in other languages? I believe Google gives major points for longevity on the Web.
Walter
On Dec 29, 2011, at 10:52 AM, derekzinger wrote:
DTP2, that’s an interesting theory, and I like how, if true, it would get me off the hook!
However, if I understand properly, Google filters its results by language. Thus when I search in Catalan, English results don’t appear at all. When we show up on page 8, that’s only compared to other pages in Catalan, not all pages on the internet. You see what I mean?
Walt, yes we have been around considerably longer in English. Likewise, we’ve been up in Catalan longer than in Spanish, and our results in the former are better than in the latter.