Navigation menu

Teaching Google Foreign Languages

Problem:

If your site includes key words in an inflected form, Google will not find them when they are entered into the search in their uninflected form (as of August 2004). Putting them in their uninflected form in a keywords meta element in the head doesn’t help, since Google ignores the keywords.

Solution:

Split the word up with invisible markup. For example, in the German version of my business site, instead of: ‘aus dem Deutschen, Spanischen, Französischen und Portugiesischen ins Englische’ I put:

aus dem Deutsch<span>en</span>, Spanisch<span>en</span>,
Franz&ouml;sisch<span>en</span> und Portugiesisch<span>en</span>
ins Englisch<span>e</span>

The markup splits the words and Google got it right next time it indexed.