How to make Google recognize language for a multilingual website?

Posted by Julien Fouilhé on Pro Webmasters See other posts from Pro Webmasters or by Julien Fouilhé
Published on 2012-10-29T14:04:15Z Indexed on 2012/10/29 17:25 UTC
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seo

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google

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multilingual

Few weeks ago, I implemented translation functionality for the website of my company. The website is now available in french and english and I did look on the internet the best way to do if we want to do not lose any ranking and to have our pages on Google. Here is what I did:

I did set a response header: Content-Language:en and Content-Language:fr
My URLs are formatted as: http://www.website.com/en/... and http://www.website.com/fr/...
My html tag is set with a lang attribute: <html lang="en"> and <html lang="fr">
There is a <link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="EnglishPageUrl"> on french pages and a <link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="frenchPageUrl"> on english pages.

But Google keeps referring to some english pages when I'm doing a search on french engine, knowing that the website was first only available in english. Is that normal? Do I have to wait still, it has been now almost one month, I thought it would be okay...?

Thank you.

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