Google Introduces New Multilingual Content Tags
Following my blog about search engine optimisation through Bing – 15 SEO Tips for Bing – I’m returning to Google to take a look at a couple of recent developments from their coding teams.
If you’re a regular reader, you’ll know that I follow Google’s announcements very closely to spot any developments that may affect their page ranking policy. If there is anything that might help my clients rank their websites higher, I’ll integrate it into their SEO strategy to get the best results possible.
Google has recently announced two new tags to help webmasters show that content is authentic and well organised: Multilingual Content Tags and Pagination Tags. As we know, Google likes well organised and authentic content, and will therefore score your website higher if you illustrate this by tagging your website thoroughly.
This week’s and next week’s blog will therefore look at the use of Pagination Tags and Multilingual Content Tags to improve your website’s SEO, and include a debate on the best options.
Improve your Website SEO with Multilingual Content Tags
Do you have international customers or does your website have some pages that are set up to appear in different languages? Then read on – this one is for you.
Back in August, I highlighted the issue of duplicate content and how Google’s rel=author mark up could be used to protect your blog content. I followed this up in September with advice for PR agencies on how to avoid negative page rankings scoring from duplicate content.
In December, Google announced the introduction of a new markup for multilingual content. This new markup is intended to help with the handling of two scenarios, as detailed on Google’s Webmaster Central Blog:
- Multiregional websites using substantially the same content. For example: English webpages for Australia, Canada and USA, differing only in price
- Multiregional websites using fully translated content, or substantially different monolingual content targeting different regions. For example: a product webpage in German, English and French
There are two main issues that can arise in these scenarios.
(1) Search engine crawlers may misunderstand multiregional or multilingual content on different pages within the same site and categorise the pages as duplicate content, scoring the website down on its page rankings. This can occur, for example, on an e-commerce site where you might have four different versions of a particular product page: one in GBP; one in USD; one in Euros, etc.
(2) When it is unclear which region a web page is written for, a search engine may serve the wrong page (i.e. Google.co.uk may serve the US page of an ecommerce site that offers UK payment and distribution).
Scenario one wouldn’t be reported by customers, as they wouldn’t see anything wrong. However your SEO score, and thus your rankings and traffic , may be negatively affected without you necessarily knowing.
Scenario two is likely to be either confusing or annoying for customers, and may directly affect your sales as customers assume you are not operating in their country, or their language.
By marking the different pages with multilingual content tags, you are firstly telling Google which page to serve to the user, and secondly telling Google that you are aware you have four pages with the same content but that it is in different (specified) languages, it is well organised for an efficient user experience, and is not duplicate content.
Another good overview, along with some Top Tips for Global Website Owners can be found here.
Multilingual Content Tags: To Use or Not to Use?
Not everyone agrees with the usefulness of the new Multilingual Contents Tags, as this blog shows.
As this is recent development for Google, I welcome your feedback on multilingual content tags – are you using them? Have you seen any benefits?
Have they been working as you wanted or are they not worth the effort?
Please use the comments box below to share your thoughts.
If you want any advice on this or if you need help implementing these tags please get in contact with me.
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[…] how to properly use things like metadata, pagination tags, author tags and multilingual content tags would benefit everyone and raise the quality of websites across the […]