Google Search is displaying French version of my website even though I'm in the U.S

Google Search is displaying French version of my website even though I'm in the U.S - 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, local-seo, , to guide you along the way. Read the discuss below, we share some tips to fix the issue about Google Search is displaying French version of my website even though I'm in the U.S.Problem :

I have a website that has dual language toggle to serve English Canadian and French Canadian. I am based in U.S.A. and when I google my website, the version with the French translation is the one that shows up. How can I fix this?

Here is a screenshot:

Solution :

Without more information, it is not easy to say why you're seeing the French version of the page in your search results. Do you have hreflang implemented on the site?

For help you might review Google's hreflang documentation

Hreflang is a way to tell search engines not only which language, but which regions, the content on your site is written for. Yoast also has a good write up.

When you use the language switching option on your site, it doesn't change the URL. If you want Google to index your website in multiple languages properly you MUST use different URLs for different languages. For example you could have:

• bsgcanada.com/en and bsgcanada.com/fr


• or en.bsgcanada.com/ and fr.bsgcanada.com/

When you base the language of the page on the geographic IP address of the user or on the user's Accept-Language header, search engine bots won't be able to crawl both language versions of your site. You can't tell search engine bots to crawl your site twice from different locations or with different Accept-Language headers.

For full details about how to set your site up see How should I structure my URLs for both SEO and localization?.

The inner pages of your site are a little bit better. You have localized the URL path. For example you have /about-us and /à-propos-de-nous which serve the same purpose in two different languages. These could be made OK for SEO.

• Implement hreflang tags between the two.


• Ensure that both can be crawled from anywhere in the world with any Accept-Language headers. Right now you sometimes redirect between the two. For example from the US I see:
  

  $ curl --head https://bsgcanada.com/%C3%A0-propos-de-nous
  HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily
  Location: https://bsgcanada.com/about-us
  

  
  

If the issue about google-search, local-seo, , 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.