Hi All,

Looking at a site for a prospect whose business is providing a site for the learning of spanish and english. Site was originally developed by Irish company but a lot of the content contains multi languages as do the tagging elements. My own understanding is that this will only serve to hamper your SEO efforts as googlebots cannot distinguish differing langugaes on same page correctly.

However I post this as the development company is well established and I would have thought this would have been a consideration as they do heaily promote SEO as part of the portfolio.

The question was also asked at last weeks e-marketing workshop and the answer echo'd my own understanding, that it is not a good thing but I look forward to debate!!

Trev

__________________
Online Conversion | Online Marketing

Spam???

Can you elaborate on "spam!!!"
The original thread was not spam so not sure if that is what the comment refers to? If so just ignore but I would welcome any comments on the original question.

We'll assuming that the sites in your sig are yours you must know a lot about seo and online marketing. Firstly i thought someone offering these services would know about this kind of thing and secondly why would you leave a development company in charge of this side of things when its your profession?

Just seems strange to me... but so does the fact that liverpool havent won the league in 18 years

__________________
PS3 Forum - Acupuncture - Yoga

Firstly thank you for the compliment "We'll assuming that the sites in your sig are yours you must know a lot about seo and online marketing

The site was originally developed by someone else, I am only looking at this now, after the fact (how often have those charged with SEO heard that) "why would you leave a development company in charge of this side of things when its your profession?"

I am looking to develop the discussion in relation to multi-language sites as my faith was questioned by this farily large Irish company developing the site, whilst also publicising SEO expertise, and then leaving it hanging in mid air with multi language content.

As for Liverpool, we all have our crosses to bear

Hi Trev

Think we may have said hello after that event. This area is changing very very quickly. It is now possible to tell Google what geo-targets various parts of your sites relate to. Google has been very good previously at figuring this out if you stik to some golden rules such as not mixing language content and setting the correct language attribute in your doc and server headers. I haven't used the new feature yet, but will be doing so in the coming weeks on a large multi-language site.

The fact that dev cos have been promoting SEO for so long has little or no correlation with effective SEO IMO. If the site is being redevloped you should do your very best to sell the client on incorporating the SEO function as early on as possible. Selling the cost savings of not duplicating work later on normally works well for larger clients.

Best rgds
Richard

__________________
Search Engine Optimisation - Red Cardinal Internet Marketing
Internet Consultant Ireland | Search Engine Optimisation Services
Catering Company Dublin - My sister's handmade canape company!

Thks Richard,
Was not aware of the new geo target ability so will follow up. If the opportunity arises for input to the forum I would be very interested in your own experiences in the coming weeks on the multi-language site.


Cheers
Trev

Google Geographic Targeting is itself in the beta phase, and it would not be right to rely on information provided by Google.

One of our website was hosted on India based Servers, and it was ranking on top of Google.co.in. However , the site was meant for US audience. We selected US region within Google webmaster tool, but it showed "ABSOLUTELY NO EFFECT"

Moreover we observed site moving down in rankings in Google.co.in.

I think it is too risky to rely on information provided by Google. They have seperate set of programmers. Dummy Programmers ( who come out in open) Matt Cutts, and the real hidden programmers.

I have tried to address several issues at : Google Geographic Targeting SEO HAWK

I think we need to wait and watch atleast for a period of 2-6 months.

Raj

The tool is broken. They haven't said so publicly, but I got it out of a few of their engineers that this thing is badly broken.

I suggest you also do some research as your blog carries a lot of bad info on this tool:
Wrong: the tool is not available for ccTLDs like .co.uk.
Wrong: you can use the tool to assign different geotarget locations based on either subdomains or subfolders.

The only problem currently is that the tool doesn't work as envisaged.

And of course Google being Google they're not going to admit that...

Thanks for your inputs. I think there was a typo error rather than "bad infor" as mentioned in your post. The domain mentioned was .com, and was mistyped as .co.uk.

You can never specify multiple locations for your website [1 domain]. If you have sub-domains ( created by using subfolder or using seperate hosting) of the same [1] website, then it is different story. This exception case wasnt specified, but it doesnt make explanation void.

A sub-domain is deemed as a seperate website in each and every scenerio. In case you have been able to specify different geo locations for your url yourdomain/page1 and yourdomain/page2, then do let me know.

Whatever may be the scenerio, but one thing is clear that this tool is itself in the BETA PHASE. We have tried using different settings for .com, and .net, but it showed NO EFFECT

I am planning to launch another thread "GOOGLE GEOGRAPHIC TARGETING SANDBOX EFFECT".

It looks like Sandbox is applicable when you change the geo location.