Google's language/geographic index

[RDuno]

Hello,

Is there anybody who can explain the following ?

I have a website based in a country (Germany) containing language specific words and the following META-tags:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="DE">
<meta name="language" content="German">

Looking at the index results on www.google.de there is a big difference if I choose “pages in German” or “pages from Germany”.
“pages in German” gives me about 50% of the total number of pages where “pages from Germany” shows me all the pages.

I have been fiddling around with the HTML tag and META tag the last 12 months, but the results are the same. About
50% of the pages are shown when using the “pages in German” option.

“pages from Germany” are probably indexed based on the physical location of the website’s server and/or on the extension
of the URL, i.e. .de

“pages in German” should look at the language (HTML/META tags) of the pages, at least that is my idea.

Anyone has an idea why Google’s index shows this gap in results ?

[tork311]

Have you tried going with just title, description, and keywords tags? I've had clients with all kinds of extra meta tags and when we kill them their serps usally go up, and I've gotten several sites out of the sandbox dumping extra meta tag garbage.

[RDuno]

Hi Tork311,

Thanks for your reply.

No, I must admit that I didn't try this without any meta-tags.

I assume you mean that I must skip the language-related meta-tags which are in fact two tags, i.e.:
<meta http-equiv="content-language" content="de">
<meta name="language" content="de">

I know, this might be double, but I am desperate to get this indexing going again. If skipping these two tags
means getting indexed again, I am more than happy to give it a try.

Could you let me know ?

Thnx,
RDuno

[tork311]

I'd kill the tags and get some relevant fresh links.

[brettb]

Yes we have had the same problem in the UK

Look here http://www.v7n.com/forums/google-for...ults-help.html


Is this what you are talking about?

[RDuno]

Ok,

I will give it a go, kill the language specific meta-tags and see what happens.

I will post the results here when I notice a change.

Thanks for your help so far.

Cheers,
RDuno