CODEWITHSUNDEEP
internationalizationseo
Thomas
Thomas

Reputation: 88757

Google indexing/search results multilingual

We have a multilingual application that can use GET parameters to distringuish between different language versions as well as the client's browser language. If the language is not supported or unknown, we use English as a fallback. Currently supported languages are English and German, btw.

Thus, a visitor with browser language 'en' (any other like 'es', 'zh' etc. - except 'de' - would result in English as described) would get the following language versions for the different urls:

This works so far but here's the problem we have with the Google index:

When we search for the site from Germany or using google.de, one (at least our customer) would expect to get the results in German.

However, Google displays the results (the page excerpt/meta description) using the english text instead of the German text.

Example, searching for "mydomain" (please excuse the programmer art :) ):

My Domain Title
http://www.mydomain.com
Here's the english meta description even if we search from Germany.

The problem seems to be that GoogleBot either uses English or doesn't provide any language information (which I think is the case) and thus gets the English version for "mydomain.com".

We tried to help GoogleBot and put "alternate" links into the page headers, i.e. for "mydomain.com" we'd have those

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="http://www.mydomain.com?language=en" /> 
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="de" href="http://www.mydomain.com?language=de" />

However, although theoretically (as far as we understand this) GoogleBot should now know about the different language versions of that page, yet it still returns English results.

We also thought about using the "canonical" tag but wouldn't that mean we'd have to select one single language version for being indexed?

Our ultimate goal would be to have Google return the English version of the page for international user and the German version for the German users.

Any hints on how we could achieve that?

Update:

Here's what we did so far to tackle the problem.

First of all, we moved the language into the site's path and whenever the language is missing, we assume German.

Thus we have this result:

http://www.mydomain.com --> 301 to "http://www.mydomain.com/de/"
http://www.mydomain.com/de/ --> German, alternatives are "http://www.mydomain.com/de/" and "http://www.mydomain.com/en/"
http://www.mydomain.com/en/ --> English, alternatives are "http://www.mydomain.com/de/" and "http://www.mydomain.com/en/"

German Google now displays the German results as expected, however English Google (or German Google set up to display English results) also shows German results. I assume the reason is either a mistake in the redirect or Google doesn't really care.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1935

Answers (1)

depoulo
depoulo

Reputation: 345

I had the same problem and solved it by using the language restrict (lr) parameter, as explained in the Google Docs

Hope this helps.

Clarification: This helps in Google Site Search (which we're using). However, normal Google searches via google.com still return those ugly mixed language results.

Upvotes: 3

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