The above issue is addressed in a post named Warning: mass local language inbound links can damage your health. The idea is that since Google places a lot of weight on anchor text in determining relevance, having disproportionate amount of backlinks in different languages, may cause your site to disappear from the index…

Google chooses the language of the site through 4 main factors. The physical location of the webserver (IP number), the TLD, The meta languages tag(s), where the incoming links come from and also the actual language of text.

Normally you’d think one of these factors could not override the rest. However, inbound links can override all other factors into duping Google that the page is of a different language than it actually is. This has disastrous consequences, for example if a German page focusing on German language readers gets a highly disproportionate amount of links from english language sites, what happens is that Google ignores the fact the server is in Germany, the tld is .de, the meta language tag is “de” and considers the site english and you will drop a lot in google.de but rise in Google.com.

This is some interesting information. I am working a lot in both English and Hebrew and may test that in the near future. Updates to come.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 25th, 2005 and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.