Multilingual Sites and Search Engines: Part 1 - How Do Search Engines Know a Site or Page is Not in English?
(Page 2 of 4 )
Search engines do not have a specially written discriminative approach to multilingual sites, but if the sites are not optimized for being searched as multilingual, the result is that they become more difficult to find. In other words, when you have a site in multiple languages, consider optimizing it in all of them. There are many SEO companies that offer optimization of sites in several target languages.
Most of the search engines provide options to search according to language and country preferences, thus giving users the chance to narrow down the search results to fewer but (supposedly) more relevant ones. But as practice shows, users rarely use this option when searching for non-English results. Instead, more users simply continue searching for non-English results using the default settings and do not bother changing them. Or maybe users believe that by limiting a search to a particular language, there is a risk of omitting useful results.
In any case, search engines do provide options for language specific searches. So the question is, how do search engines distinguish languages? There are several possible ways in which search engines distinguish language. Search engines are not humans; they do not recognize a language when they see it. Instead they use other means to classify whether a particular page is in a particular language. One place from which they get language information is the <html lang="xx"> tag.
The <html lang="xx"> Tag and Searching by Language
Using this tag to set the language of the page is not mandatory, because search engines will find the page even if you leave the encoding to "en," but it is better to indicate the language, because this will make it easier to distinguish that the page is in the particular language. It can be argued whether this tag is that important, but in any case, especially if your page is only in one foreign language, it is safer to include information about the language.
Of course, search engines do crawl the text itself and will notice the foreign language, but it will be far easier and much more effective if you provide them with more information, instead of relying on their ability to find it and display it. Providing the language information in the <html lang="xx"> tag increases your chances to appear in the beginning of the search results when users search for results in a particular language only. On the other hand, the presence of the <html lang="xx"> tag is not a guarantee that your page will top the lists of search results, because Google shows search results for pages where the search string has been found, no matter what the language of the page is set to.
Next: IPs, TLDs, and Searching by Country >>
More Search Optimization Articles
More By Tsvetanka Stoyanova
|
| · | | | · | | | · | | | · | | | · | | | · | | | · | | | · | | | · | | | · | | | · | | | · | | | · | | | · | | | · | | | · | | | | |
|
/ 18 
