Google Can Assign Multiple Languages Per Page

Google generally likes you to stick with one language per page, that isn’t to say you cannot use different pages throughout your site with different languages. But if you do not listen and you put multiple languages on a page, Google can assign multiple languages to that page, said John Mueller of Google.

John Mueller said this at the 58:45 minutes where he said “We will still try to focus on the primary language if we can determine one. If we can’t determine one primary languages then we might use like multiple languages and assign that to the page.”

He then explains this in more detail saying “and you can sometimes see that if you do something like a site query for your website and then go into the advanced search settings and specify language. Then you can sometimes see like which language is being recognized for my website. And if you try other languages you might see that oh it’s being recognized for Dutch and English Which doesn’t mean that it has less weight in Dutch, it’s just well we recognize that it’s like a mix. And from that point of view it’s kind of something you can kind of double check there.”

He said he sees this sometimes with destination and vacation sites, he said “I think the one situation i would watch out for is if your page is recognized as being in a language that is not correct. Like for example, if you have an English website on vacation homes in Spain and all the addresses are in Spanish and all the place names are in Spanish and we think the whole page is only in Spanish then it will be hard for us to rank that page if someone is searching for vacation homes in Spain because we think oh this is all in Spanish this is not English what what this person is looking for.”

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