Many online business owners runs their websites in multiple languages to provide their contents for different audiences from different locations worldwide. One of the major SEO issues that occupies these online business owners is how to indicate search engines what is the best language page to serve the users. Now, Google might have a solution…

Google announced yesterday that webmasters can use a new HTML markup to signal the search engine what is the page’s language and the region it is designated for. The goals are that Google will show the most suitable page in their search results depends on the region the user has searched from and additionally to avoid duplicate content problems the similar content pages may cause.

How To Specify The Language And The Region

The new markup is basically an expansion of the rel=”alternate” code that goes in the header section of the page HTML, with a hreflang element. Let’s describe how to add the code with a simple example: Let’s say a webmaster has two pages with the same content on his site, one is designated for Spain-Spanish people and one is designated for Mexico-Spanish people:

• domain.com/spain
• domain.com/mexico

The webmaster needs to add the following link element markup to the header section of the Spain-Spanish page:

<link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”es-MX” href=”http://domain.com/mexico” />

And he needs to add the following link element markup to the header section of the Mexico-Spanish page:

<link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”es-ES” href=”http://domain.com/spain” />

This will signal Google that there is an alternative version of the page with the same content, that is designated for different language/region.

I hope that you understand my explanation and if not you can read more about it in this Google Help Page.