Multilingual sites and Google search results, using sub-folders for language

Multilingual sites and Google search results, using sub-folders for language - Google Search Console is a free application that allows you to identify, troubleshoot, and resolve any issues that Google may encounter as it crawls and attempts to index your website in search results. If you’re not the most technical person in the world, some of the errors you’re likely to encounter there may leave you scratching your head. We wanted to make it a bit easier, so we put together this handy set of tips about google-search, multilingual, , to guide you along the way. Read the discuss below, we share some tips to fix the issue about Multilingual sites and Google search results, using sub-folders for language.Problem :

About three months ago we added an English version of our, previously Japanese only, site under the subfolder /en/ we've tried to follow the sometimes incomplete best practices laid out by Google by adding alternate tags to all pages that are currently translated. The top page for instance has the following meta tags for language.

<link rel="canonical" href="/">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="ja" href="/">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="/en/">

While the English main page under /en/ has

<link rel="canonical" href="/en/">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="ja" href="/">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="/en/">

Alternate languages are setup in the sitemap. (as per Google's recommendations)

It seems however that Google absolutely refuses to show the English top page in results when the user is using English at google.com if you search you'll, as of this post, get the Japanese description and a title that Google has apparently invented instead of the title and description in the meta-tags for the /en/ index page.

Does anyone have any experience with subfolders actually working to affect search results? What are the best practices for ensuring that the correct language version of my website is displayed through Google and other search engines? And how long will it take before the new language version becomes prominent in search engine results?

NOTE: per GDav's suggestion I've removed the following tags for now as a test.

<link rel="canonical" href="/">
<link rel="canonical" href="/en/">

Solution :

Subdirectories aren't themselves an issue: I've worked with successfully geotargeted sites which are organised that way. Obviously, this assumes good practice in other areas, e.g. appropriately targeted content.

One possible problem I can see with your code above is use of the canonical link element. Originally Google recommended it, but no longer do, so I'd try removing that before proceeding further. A colleague of mine attended a Google Webmaster Hangout to enquire how long this code should need to take effect, and was told that it should be a matter of weeks.

That element aside, if you haven't already done so, and you're using a gTLD, setting geographic target for the Japanese subdirectory in Google Webmaster Tools is worthwhile. You might want to consider setting /en/ to unspecified, too, if it's genuinely not aimed anywhere in particular.

I maintain a global website with 13 language variants - all set up in exactly this was (/en/ /fr/ /pl/ etc...)

If you can show me a link to your website I'd be happy to take a look

I would set up url rewriting rules to 301 redirect your previous urls to example.com/ja/

I did it on some sites with no canonical at all, using only the alternate languages links, but with each page full url.

E.g.:

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="/en/home-en/">
on the Japanese page

and
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="ja" href="/ja/home-ja/">
on the English page

If the issue about google-search, multilingual, , is resolved, there’s a good chance that your content will get indexed and you’ll start to show up in Google search results. This means a greater chance to drive organic search traffic to your site.