Google not indexing other language pages of Joomla site?

Question

We have built a site in Joomla (worldhotels.com) and it has a number of languages.

We have not put in foreign lanugage metas yet but have, for example, German texts on the /de pages.

We implemented a site map (indexed about 1/3 iof pages after a few weeks).

It seems that the /en URLs are being indexed in google.com and google.co.uk but the german pages /de are not being indexed by google.de. I checked this by taking some English text from the /en pages and inputting them into google.co.uk and some German text from the German pages and inputting it into Google.de.

English is indexed. German not.

For the record, there are no "no index" commands.

Does anyone know where to start looking to fix this? Is it a Joomla thing or something else?

Many thanks

Answer 1

Your default language is English. So when googlebot reaches your main page,(assume index.html), it finds only english pages. After index.html, google follows all links inside index.html and continue to crawl your pages one by one. At crawling process, if google does not reach a link like worldhotels.com/de , it never knows about 'de' folder and it's content pages. If your change language mechanism is based on javascript , google never knows about the 'de' folder. Google do not follow javascript to find new URL. So try to use anchor tag <a href="worldhotels.com/de" ...> for introduce new language at your index.html

Answer 2

More detailed:

Take, for example the page for the Royal Garden Hotel in London: worldhotels.com/en/hotels-in-great-britain/hotels-in-london/royal-garden-hotel

If you take this URL and put it into Google.co.uk it is indexed.

If you take the German version of this page: worldhotels.com/de/hotels-in-great-britain/hotels-in-london/royal-garden-hotel

it is also indexed by Google.

However, now take some text from each page:

For EN: the Royal Garden Hotel offers 394 rooms and 17 sumptuous suites that offer views of Kensington Gardens or the High Street

If you put this text into Google.co.uk, the hotel page comes up.

For DE: Es bietet auf 10 Etagen 396 Luxuszimmer, viele von ihnen mit Verbindungstür. Sie sind im klassischen, unaufdringlichen

If you put this text into Google.de, NOTHING comes up

Very strange!!!

SEO BROWSER – This is how the search engine sees the page

Then if you take the German URL (http://www.worldhotels.com/de/hotels-in-great-britain/hotels-in-london/royal-garden-hotel) and put it into www.seo-browser.com

Note: Click on advanced and when prompted create an account (free)

If you look at the first part of the page (on the right hand column) you will see:

Lang: en (if you can't see it, CTRL F it)

Why do you think that the search engine see the Language and EN on the DE page?

And a little further down you will see:

» HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently From http://www.worldhotels.com/de/hotels-in-great-britain/hotels-in-london/royal-garden-hotel To http://www.worldhotels.com/en/hotels-in-great-britain/hotels-in-london/royal-garden-hotel

Now what is interesting is that the URL does not redirect to EN, so why is the search engine seeing that command? Surely this is causing some confusion with the spiders?

Thanks!