Multilingual sites and Google search results, do subfolders really work?
- by AWinter
About three months ago we added an English version of our, previously Japanese only, site http://www.clubberia.com under the subfolder http://www.clubberia.com/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/">
We also have these alternate languages setup in the sitemap. (as per Google's recommendations) http://www.clubberia.com/sitemap.xml
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 for "clubberia" 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? Am I being too impatient, or possibly doing something incorrect? Should we just give up on subfolders and push to subdomains (not the prettiest option)?
