Question: A few weeks ago I implemented a translation functionality for my company website. The website now offers content in french and English and I took the time to look on various guides on the internet on methods how this can be done in a friendly way so that my rankings would not be affected as a result.

Here is what I did:

* I did set a response header: `Content-Language:en` and `Content-Language:fr`
* My URLs are formatted as: `www.website.com/en/...` and `www.website.com/fr/...`
* My HTML tag is set with a lang attribute: `<html lang="en">` and `<html lang="fr">`
* `<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="EnglishPageUrl">` on French pages.
* `<link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr" href="frenchPageUrl">` on English pages.

But Google keeps referring to some English pages when I'm doing a search on Google.fr, knowing that the website was first only available in English. 

Is that normal? Do I have to wait still, it has been now almost one month, I thought it would be okay...?

Thank you.

Answer: 
From Google Webmaster Tools Support page on [Multi-region and multilingual sites](http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=182192)

> 
> **Managing multilingual versions of your site**
> 
> 
> Make sure the page language is obvious
> 
> 
> Google uses only the visible content of your page to determine its
> language. We don’t use any code-level language information such as
> Lang attributes. You can help Google determine the language correctly
> by using a single language for content and navigation on each page,
> and by avoiding side-by-side translations. Translating only the
> boilerplate text of your pages while keeping the bulk of your content
> in a single language (as often happens on pages featuring
> user-generated content) can create a bad user experience if the same
> content appears multiple times in search results with various
> boilerplate languages.
> 
> 
> Use robots.txt to block search engines from crawling automatically
> translated pages on your site. Automated translations don’t always
> make sense and could be viewed as spam. More importantly, a poor or
> artificial-sounding translation can harm your site’s perception.
> 
> 
> Make sure each language version is easily discoverable
> 
> 
> Keep the content for each language on separate URLs. Don’t use cookies
> to show translated versions of the page. Consider cross-linking each
> language version of a page. That way, a French user who lands on the
> German version of your page can get to the right language version with
> a single click.
> 
> 
> Avoid automatic redirection based on the user’s perceived language.
> These redirections could prevent users (and search engines) from
> viewing all the versions of your site.
> 
> 
> Carefully consider your choice of URL
> 
> 
> Google uses the content of the page to determine its language, but the
> URL itself provides human users with useful clues about the page’s
> content. For example, the following .ca URLs use fr as a subdomain or
> subdirectory to clearly indicate French content:
> `http://example.ca/fr/vélo-de-montagne.html`
> `http://fr.example.ca/vélo-de-montagne.html`
> 
> 
> Signaling the language in the URL may also help you to discover issues
> with multilingual content on your site.
> 
> 
> It’s fine to translate words in the URL, or to use an
> Internationalized Domain Name (IDN). Make sure to use UTF-8 encoding
> in the URL (in fact, we recommend using UTF-8 wherever possible) and
> remember to escape the URLs properly when linking to them.
> 
> 
>
You made a mistake in the **hreflang="en"** in the following, it must be **hreflang="fr"** on English pages:
 on English pages.