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Manfred von Richthofen
Manfred von Richthofen

Reputation: 51

Meta tags: title and description for both latin and non latin letter site

I have (I believe) a unique situation; a bit of a puzzle. heres the deal.

Situation: I have a one language web site, where everything (content, links) are in non-latin based characters. (Cyrillic)(utf-8)

The site aims to connect Russian reading/speaking people around the globe.

Problem is that lots of people (about 70%) are typing Russian search terms using Latin letters. For example: "novaja mashina", in English means nothing, but in Russian means "new car".

My task is to construct Title of the main page and Meta tag=description, so I can kill two birds with one stone if possible, meaning to accommodate people who have and will use Cyrillic keyboards and type search terms in Cyrillic and people who will use Latin letters constructing Russian words and still find my site.

My solution, (poor I believe), was to simply stack Latin and Cyrillic one after another in title tag and same with in meta=description.

if not

Can some one share a cleverer/better solution??

Thank you in advance!!!

Upvotes: 2

Views: 1977

Answers (1)

Shervin
Shervin

Reputation: 1965

Actually, <meta> tags have a lang attribute which can help search engines to:

  • Understand that you have a multilingual page
  • Index Meta values in each language separately and properly.

Here is how lang attribute can be used:

<html lang="ru">
  <head>
    <meta charset="UTF-8">
    <meta name="description" lang="ru" content="новая машина">
    <meta name="description" lang="ru-Latn-t-cyrl" content="novaya mashina">
    <meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="ru, ru-Latn-t-cyrl"/>
  </head>
...
</html>

The language code ru-Latn-t-cyrl means that the value of the content tag is actually in Russian, but it was transliterated from Cyrillic to Latin. For detailed information about this convention for language codes, see BCP 47 Extension T. content value of http-equiv="Content-Language" tells the browsers that your page includes both Russian and Russian transliterated into Latin.

Now your questions:

  • Will search engine robot/crawler ignore Russian words written in English?

Probably not. They would be still indexed and your page might end up appearing in the search results for that transliterated string.

  • Will google or other search engines get confused or negatively affect ranking if I do that.

I can not say with certainty since I'm not really an SEO expert, but it's unlikely.

  • Is it a good idea to write title and meta descr in English also?

It depends. If you would like the site to show up in English search.

  • Will google consider title too long and penalize me? (Cyrillic+Latin-russian+English of the same thing 3 times will end up being kinda long for a title)

If you don't have English as a language for your site, it doesn't make much sense to have an English title. If you do, then change the title of pages to English when the user switches the language to English. And I assume that having transliterated title is too much and it is not nice as well. Go for more detailed <meta> tags.

Finally, here are some internationalization best practices from W3C regarding declaring language in HTML.

Upvotes: 1

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