Hi folks, MediaWiki emits the hreflang attribute on language links, but only as part of the links in the body, and not in the <head> as recommended by Google [1]. The result of this is that Google (and possibly other search engines) doesn't interpret the hreflang attribute for purposes of prioritizing search results in the user's own language.
From a contact at Google we asked about this: "we currently don't use those annotations on the links, we need to see the hreflang link-elements in the head in order to understand that connection. The important parts there are the we need to have them in the "head", we need to have them confirmed from the other versions (so DE needs to refer to EN, and EN to DE -- it can't be one-sided), and it needs to be between the canonical URLs. (...) I imagine if you just added the cross-links as you have them in the sidebar as link-elements to the head then you'd be covered." This of course would add some additional payload to pages with lots of language links, but could help avoid results like [2] where the English language version of an article is #1 and the Indonesian one makes no appearance at all. Results vary greatly and it's hard to say how big a problem this is, but even if boosts discoverability of content in the user's language by only 10% or so, that would still be a pretty big win for local content. I'm curious if folks see any downside, other than the additional page payload, in adding this information to the page header. Given the time it takes for the index to be updated, we should be careful about any potential negative consequences. Thanks, Erik [1] https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en [2] https://www.google.co.id/?gws_rd=ssl#q=edison -- Erik Möller VP of Product & Strategy, Wikimedia Foundation _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
