Can Inbound Links in Local languages Harm Your Ranking?
It seems that it can, at least according to this entry I’ve found on Multinlingual Search:
Google chooses the language of the site through 4 main factors. The physical location of the webserver (IP number), the top level domain name – ‘ .de’ for instance, the meta language tag(s), where the incoming links come from and also the actual language of the 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. Google ignores the fact the server is in Germany, the top level domain is ‘.de’, the meta language tag is “de” and considers the site english – which results in dropping a lot in google.de but rising in Google.com.
Is there anything you can do to prevent this from happening to your own website? Yes, if you can get enough inbound links in the appropriate language again. I wish this page would detail the process a little more, though. At least it’s already a good thing to be aware of the problem, since it’s probably not what webmasters will think of first when their sites suddenly fall in ranking…
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This entry was posted on Thursday, August 25th, 2005 at 10:14 am and is filed under Link Building, SEO Articles, SEO Tips. 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.
