Does Language Affect the Organic Search Result Ranking?

by Shermy Mohan - 1/11/2022 1034 Views

Does language affect the ranking of a site? Is language one of Google’s ranking factors? Know more about whether language matters or not for a website.

Using language in your site will help in targeting the audience i.e. the people who use language preferences in their search. Most of the people searching online prefer results that are personalized for them. In that way, when the site has multiple languages it will help reach the targeted audience.

But you might have a doubt whether different languages in your website affect the other audience to your site?

Does the use of multiple languages affect the ranking of a site?

So first we will go from knowing whether language is considered as a ranking factor or not.

Language as a ranking factor as it claims to be

Reaching the targeted people requires the right language usage. For instance; if you wish to target the people who speak English, then it is important that you write the content in that particular language. But for the audience who doesn't want the content to be in English won't be able to get that content, as it won't be ranked on the search engine result page.

If you are a brand that wants to achieve a better audience for more regions then it is important that you create the content in various languages.

So technically, one can say that language plays an important role in the process of ranking of a page.

There are some ways where you can tell the search engine that you are targeting a particular set of people who speak a certain language or a certain region.

Hreflang attribute - where you can mention to Google that you are targeting certain place or certain language.

For instance; if you are targeting people from the country Korea, then the code will go like

The language of the content in meta tag - this will intimate to the search engine that the particular site is targeting people who speak a certain language or the people from a certain destination.

To add the language in the meta tag :

These are the two ways you can tell Google that you are targeting a certain set of people.

Language is surely a ranking factor

There are many articles on how to manage multiple regions or multiple languages at the same time. This gives a clear explanation that Google gives importance to languages.

"Search settings are also an important indicator of which results you're likely to find useful, such as if you set a preferred language or opted in to SafeSearch (a tool that helps filter out explicit results)." - Google

Google has also mentioned the method of working with search algorithms as said above.

For instance; if a person has his preferred language as English but he lives in a location in Japan, then Google will search for sites that has a location as Japan with the language as English. Or if you are a site owner and operating from Japan but in the English language then Google will target people from Japan who prefer English.

For that, you can use these codes that will help you target the right audience.

It is also advisable to use canonical language if there is a need.

"If you provide similar or duplicate content on different URLs in the same language as part of a multi-regional site (for instance, if both example.de/ and example.com/de/ show similar German language content), you should pick a preferred version and use the rel="canonical" element and hreflang tags to make sure that the correct language or regional URL is served to searchers." - Google

Google also accepts that in one of its documentation that the language preference and canonical tags can be put together.

So it goes like, "Different language versions of a single page are considered duplicates only if the main content is in the same language (that is, if only the header, footer, and other non-critical text is translated, but the body remains the same, then the pages are considered to be duplicates)."- Google

Google also suggests,

"Specify a canonical page when using hreflang tags. Specify a canonical page in the same language, or the best possible substitute language if a canonical doesn't exist for the same language." - Google

These are some of the evidence that language is one of the ranking factors considered by Google.

Coming to an end, it is indeed clear that Google has considered language as one of the ranking factors for a site. So make use of languages in your site to increase the level of audience and also to gain a better ranking on the search engine result page. As there is also a multiple language targeting options it is easy that you can cover up all your audience.

Category :

SEO News

Tags :

SEO, SEO guide, Content

About Shermy Mohan

I, Shermy have been a lead Technical News Writer since 2018. I’m good at doing research and conveying it into writing. I write on Marketing trending topics, fresh Search Engine & Social Media updates and News. .... more info about the author