Should We Add the W3.org Language Tag To Every Page Or Just The Home Page?
-
Greetings,
We have five international sites around the world, two of which are in difference languages. Currently we have the following line of html code on the home page of each of the sites:
Clearly, we need to change the "en" portion for the sites that aren't in English, but, should we include that meta tag in each of the site's pages, or will the home page suffice. Thanks!
-
Google doesn't care the W3.org language tag (Bing does it, instead).
Said that using it on every page is a good practice for W3.org, hence do that.
For Google, if the site is using a Country Code Top Level Name (i.e.: .it, .fr, .de...), then the site will be automatically target the country related to the domain termination (i.e.: .de > Germany and just Germany, not Austria or any other German speaking country).
If the site is under a generic domain name (i.e.: .com), then you have to specify in the Google Webmaster Tools setting of the site what country (hence regional Google) you want the site itself to target.
NOTE: if you are targeting language and not countries, don't use ccTld domain names, because, as I said before, those domain names targets only the country the domain termination is paired to.
Then... use the hreflang="x" markup so to suggest to Google what URL must be shown to the user depending on the language they use (check this official Google page).
Finally, do a great localization of the content and try to obtain authoritative quality signals like links from local sites and social shares from local users.
-
Thanks, Yiannis
I definitely see higher rankings and traffic for the sites that have the specific language tag.
Does anyone else have other input to provide?
-
Hello,
Index page will be more than enough. Also the fact that the language is non English is now sufficient enough for google to understand and list the web site to the relevant country directories.
Best of luck!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Help.. there was a html and php version of my home page on my server for about a week. Now lost all rankings!
Our home page has disappeared from the Google SERPS completely. It won't even show for a search of our business name although other internal pages appear. Site appears in bing for our keywords but not for our business name. When I republished the site I got a message saying there was a php and html version of the site on the home page. I deleted this immediately but was then advised by another staff member that they had also got that message the week before but not done anything about it - so I think it was out there for about a week. Could this be the cause of the ranking drop? We have also done the following: Checked GWM for robots issue, manual action, crawl errors, blocked URLs - all good. Some crawl errors on other pages relating to broken links. All sorted and marked as fixed. Checked for duplicate content - redirected non www version of site to www Checked back links Removed video from home page that was temporarily unavailable when we did fetch and render Added canonical tag Added H1 tag that was missing Coding checked - all looks good There has been no change to the content of the page. We have fetched and rendered and resubmitted for indexing but it's still not coming back in SERPS it did for a short time the other day and then after a couple of days disappeared again Prior to all this it had ranked really well for our most important keywords for years. It's not a new site. The page is indexed as it comes up when doing a site: search. Please can anyone help? Nobody seems to have the answer and we don't know what else to do. The site is NSFW NSFW https://goo.gl/dwA8YB Main keyword sex toy party
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GemmaApril0 -
Why is /home used in this company's home URL?
Just working with a company that has chosen a home URL with /home latched on - very strange indeed - has anybody else comes across this kind of homepage URL "decision" in the past? I can't see why on earth anybody would do this! Perhaps simply a logic-defying decision?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Best Way to Incorporate FAQs into Every Page - Duplicate Content?
Hi Mozzers, We want to incorporate a 'Dictionary' of terms onto quite a few pages on our site, similar to an FAQ system. The 'Dictionary' has 285 terms in it, with about 1 sentence of content for each one (approximately 5,000 words total). The content is unique to our site and not keyword stuffed, but I am unsure what Google will think about us having all this shared content on these pages. I have a few ideas about how we can build this, but my higher-ups really want the entire dictionary on every page. Thoughts? Image of what we're thinking here - http://screencast.com/t/GkhOktwC4I Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W0 -
Using author on every page of website?
I'm currently get to grips with schema and one thing im using is author on my blog posts and seeing my photo etc on organic searches which are related. I see one of my competitors is using author on every page on their website, not just blog posts etc. Are there any recommendation when it should be used? Should it be site wide or is it really intended for blog posts etc? Would it be wrong for me to use on every page of my website as one of my businesses is myself as a lone person? This is what you get when searching for driving lessons in just about any town! https://www.google.co.uk/#gs_rn=15&gs_ri=psy-ab&tok=LS_DOrAHswmHC9_8AJZEJA&suggest=p&pq=driving instructor brighton&cp=20&gs_id=1k2&xhr=t&q=driving+lessons+crawley&es_nrs=true&pf=p&sclient=psy-ab&oq=driving+lessons+craw&gs_l=&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_cp.r_qf.&bvm=bv.47244034,d.d2k&fp=45c2f917e11bca99&biw=1680&bih=843 Any comments welcome! Antony
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ant710 -
Blocking Pages Via Robots, Can Images On Those Pages Be Included In Image Search
Hi! I have pages within my forum where visitors can upload photos. When they upload photos they provide a simple statement about the photo but no real information about the image,definitely not enough for the page to be deemed worthy of being indexed. The industry however is one that really leans on images and having the images in Google Image search is important to us. The url structure is like such: domain.com/community/photos/~username~/picture111111.aspx I wish to block the whole folder from Googlebot to prevent these low quality pages from being added to Google's main SERP results. This would be something like this: User-agent: googlebot Disallow: /community/photos/ Can I disallow Googlebot specifically rather than just using User-agent: * which would then allow googlebot-image to pick up the photos? I plan on configuring a way to add meaningful alt attributes and image names to assist in visibility, but the actual act of blocking the pages and getting the images picked up... Is this possible? Thanks! Leona
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HD_Leona0 -
Are links to on-page content crawled / have any effect on page rank?
Lets say I have a really long article that begins with links to <a name="something">anchors on the same page.</a> <a name="something"></a> <a name="something">E.g.,</a> Chapter 1, Chapter 2, etc, allowing the user to scroll down to different content. There are also other links on this page that link to other pages. A few questions: Googlebot arrives on the page. Does it crawl links that point to anchors on the same page? When link juice is divided among all the links on the page, do these links count and page rank is then lost? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | anthematic0 -
Deep Page is Ranking for Main Keyword, But I Want the Home Page to Rank
A deep page is ranking for a competitive and essential keyword, I'd like the home page to rank. The main reasons are probably: This specific page is optimized for just that keyword. Contains keyword in URL I've optimized the home page for this keyword as much as possible without sacrificing the integrity of the home page and the other keywords I need to maintain. My main question is: If I use a 301 redirect on this deep page to the home page, am I risking my current ranking, or will my home page replace it on the SERPs? Thanks so much in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ClarityVentures0 -
Google replacing subpages in index with home page?
Hi! I run a backlink building company. Recently, we had a customer who had us build targeted backlinks to certain subpages on his site. Then something really bizarre happened...all of a sudden, their subpages that were indexed in Google (the ones we were building links to) disappeared from the index, to be replaced with their home page. They haven't lost their rank, per se--it's just now their home page instead of their subpages. At this point, we are tracking literally thousands of keywords for our link building customers, and we've never run into this issue before. Have you ever run into it? If so, what's the best way to handle it from an SEO company perspective? They have a sitemap.xml and their GWT account reports no crawl errors, so it doesn't seem to be a site issue.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ownlocal0