Mutli Language SEO

di11on

Hi all,

We've recently set up a French version of our site. French is the default language, but it is available in English also.

Problem is, that when I look in the "Keywords" section in Google Webmaster tools, I see English words and French words.

I would have thought that Google would index and rank your site independently for each language, but from the keywords section, it looks like it all gets done together. I.e. I think the English keywords are diluting the relevance of the French.

There's a second issue here. The English site is optimised for a single word, whilst I need to optimise the French site for a phrase. Trouble is, the english word is dominating the French phrase.

Should I just "noindex" the English content on the site completely? It would be nice if there was a way of doing it without this.

The language parameters seems to be correctly set in webmaster tools, so this wouldn't appear to be the issue.

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance.

tomED

I'm assuming these sites are both run from the same domain and both are targeted at different countries?

Why not set up a seperate domain, e.g. french.mysite.com and eng.mysite.com and individually geo-target them. If that's possible, that would solve the problem you are having.

di11on

Thanks TomEd,

They are both on different domains. One is a .ie and the other a .fr, both targeted at the respective country.

Problem isn't the geotargeting, but the language targeting. Google seems to see english words and french words both competing for relevance. For example, if I look at the keywords in Google Webmaster Tools, I'll see somethign like this:

[English keyword 1]
[English keyword 2]
[French keyword 1]
[English keyword 3]
[French keyword 2]

Apart from deleting the English translation on the French site, I don't see a way around it.

Would be grateful for suggestions.

tomED

di11on wrote: »

Thanks TomEd,

They are both on different domains. One is a .ie and the other a .fr, both targeted at the respective country.

Problem isn't the geotargeting, but the language targeting. Google seems to see english words and french words both competing for relevance. For example, if I look at the keywords in Google Webmaster Tools, I'll see somethign like this:

[English keyword 1]
[English keyword 2]
[French keyword 1]
[English keyword 3]
[French keyword 2]

Apart from deleting the English translation on the French site, I don't see a way around it.

Would be grateful for suggestions.

Can you give real examples so I can have a look for you?

blue4ever

di11on wrote: »

Thanks TomEd,

They are both on different domains. One is a .ie and the other a .fr, both targeted at the respective country.

Problem isn't the geotargeting, but the language targeting. Google seems to see english words and french words both competing for relevance. For example, if I look at the keywords in Google Webmaster Tools, I'll see somethign like this:

[English keyword 1]
[English keyword 2]
[French keyword 1]
[English keyword 3]
[French keyword 2]

Apart from deleting the English translation on the French site, I don't see a way around it.

Would be grateful for suggestions.

confused.com!
If you look in G webmaster - and you go to your .ie site (seperate as you have said to the fr) why are the french words - that don't exist on the .ie site
(at all?), why are they showing up in GWT?
Or is that the question again!

I assume that its a separate domain - completely not a subdomain not:
.ie.this_site.com

and

.fr.this_site.com