Google's Search Liaison, Danny Sullivan, posted a message on Twitter and other social networks, apologizing for the ongoing issues and complaints with Google showing the preferred language in the search results. Google said the issue seems to be from mobile sites not being properly configured and Google's mobile-first indexing being more widespread.
Google said, "We appreciate the concern expressed by those seeking results in a preferred language. This is a priority for us to resolve. We will continue to investigate solutions, but we also need time to ensure those work well." We have not made any recent change in how our systems determine the languages of results to display. However, as we crawl more of the web on a mobile-first basis, issues may arise when we index multilingual content not properly indicating which version we should display." Our guidance about multilingual content is here. We're also further checking our own systems to understand potential issues or improvements we can make. Again, we appreciate the concern. It is a priority for us to address."
Google also posted the message in Catalan because that is where most of these complaints have been coming from for the past month or so:
Entenem la preocupació dels que busqueu resultats en una llengua concreta. És una de les nostres prioritats i continuem investigant solucions tot i que requereix temps assegurar-se que funcionin de manera perfecte.... https://t.co/qzCYFXmfb3
— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) January 25, 2023
The issue has been going on for a couple months now, here are some older tweets Danny replied to so you can see yourself:
Hi @Google what happens recently with my searchs in Catalan language? Why the main results are in Spanish when I know for sure that there's information in Catalan and my browser is set in Catalan?
— David de Montserrat (@dmontserratnono) December 20, 2022
To add, it's generally the case we do regularly want to return content in the language somone searched for. Apologies if this isn't happening. If anyone is comfortable sharing some examples where the results aren't in your query language, that will help us look into this more.
— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) December 21, 2022
Thank you and grà cies, adding this to the feedback for our team. Much appreciated.
— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) December 21, 2022
Recently, Danny posted a response to this:
As said before, we're still looking into how to improve things, including helping publishers understand more about making use of our guidance in terms of multilingual content, which helps us in showing content https://t.co/UUfbrLQ3Ne
— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) January 23, 2023
Sorry, but this is not true. @wikipedia is well divided into languages, with different URLs, and searching for Basque words gives results in Spanish, hiding the Basque Wikipedia ones.
— Galder Gonzalez🔻 (@theklaneh) January 24, 2023
Thanks for your answer. Here you have two examples. If I type Donostia, I get first San Sebastián Spanish Wikipedia page and then Basque one, with the correct title.
— Galder Gonzalez🔻 (@theklaneh) January 24, 2023
If I search for Kelantan, I get the Spanish one first, then the malayan one, instead of https://t.co/17fhAzsLk8. pic.twitter.com/e2dt8kYU0o
Anyway, Google is working on something but it does not sound like it will be a quick fix.
Content Source: seroundtable.com
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