Day 2: Indexing 63
Shown on screen 1
Pages whose boilerplate, such as menu and footer, is translated while the main content is not are near matches: the main reason to visit is the same, so Google clusters them as duplicates.
“When main content is the same, pages may be clustered.”
Wording checked against the slide or recording
Speaker John MuellerIn Day 2, 11:55 · Handling web duplicationEvidence slide photo, transcript
Used byrequirement DEV-INT-07
Said on stage 43
The notranslate robots rule tells Google not to offer a translation of the page in search results.
Speaker John MuellerIn Day 2, 10:30 · Controlling indexingEvidence transcript
Used byrequirement DEV-IDX-09
John Mueller said notranslate can also be set in a meta tag named google, and that in that form it also turns off Chrome's automatic translation of the page.
Speaker John MuellerIn Day 2, 10:30 · Controlling indexingEvidence transcript
Used byrequirement DEV-IDX-09
John Mueller said he dislikes notranslate because automatic translation is a form of accessibility for visitors who cannot read the page's language.
Speaker John MuellerIn Day 2, 10:30 · Controlling indexingEvidence transcript
In classic results users can usually tell when content in their language is missing, poorly translated or from another country, but AI answers synthesize many sources and hide this; the speaker called it an invisible gap.
“an invisible gap”
Speaker GoogleIn Day 2, 14:15 · Focusing on Internationalisation and LocalisationEvidence transcript
Users often assume AI is all-knowing and borderless, but AI is still language-dependent: if an AI answer is synthesized from the top results, a query in another language draws on a totally different set of data.
“AI is still language-dependent”
Speaker GoogleIn Day 2, 14:15 · Focusing on Internationalisation and LocalisationEvidence transcript
- Extends D1-C038 Day 1: AI Mode and AI Overviews use the same crawling and the same index as Search. At serving they add grounding on…
- Extended by D2-C972 Day 2: In the presenter's observation, AI answers to Persian queries are written in Persian but cite some English…
In the speaker's own experience, the differences between languages are larger in AI answers than in classic search results.
Speaker GoogleIn Day 2, 14:15 · Focusing on Internationalisation and LocalisationEvidence transcript
Site owners may want to research whether they show up in AI answers in each language and market they serve, to find blind spots.
Speaker GoogleIn Day 2, 14:15 · Focusing on Internationalisation and LocalisationEvidence transcript
Whether machine-translated content is acceptable depends on the case and is the site owner's decision, after weighing three things machine translation can miss: translation quality, local conventions and cultural adaptation.
Speaker GoogleIn Day 2, 14:15 · Focusing on Internationalisation and LocalisationEvidence transcript
Used byrequirement DEV-INT-10
To show uneven machine-translation quality, the speaker showed Google Translate output of attendee questions from a visit to China with a Google colleague, Gary, some clear and some unintelligible, and a restaurant menu whose English listed an item called 'aggressive element'.
Speaker GoogleIn Day 2, 14:15 · Focusing on Internationalisation and LocalisationEvidence transcript
Localisation should account for local conventions such as date formats, which differ between Europe, the UK, the US and other countries, and calendars (in Thailand the current year is 2569), or a date can point users to the wrong day.
Speaker GoogleIn Day 2, 14:15 · Focusing on Internationalisation and LocalisationEvidence transcript
Used byrequirements DEV-INT-10, DEV-SDA-05
According to the speaker, shoppers in Europe and the US pay a lot of attention to promotions and discounts when deciding to buy (no source for this was captured), one of the cultural factors localisation should take into account.
Speaker GoogleIn Day 2, 14:15 · Focusing on Internationalisation and LocalisationEvidence transcript
According to consumer data shown on a slide in the talk (source not captured), US consumers judge product quality more by user feedback and reviews, while European shoppers seem to look more at brand reputation.
Speaker GoogleIn Day 2, 14:15 · Focusing on Internationalisation and LocalisationEvidence transcript
- Extended by D3-C341 Day 3: Some countries rely a lot on social proof such as reviews, Google's speaker said, recalling a point from…
According to consumer data shown on a slide in the talk (source not captured), German shoppers also rely heavily on expert recommendations and certifications when judging product quality.
Speaker GoogleIn Day 2, 14:15 · Focusing on Internationalisation and LocalisationEvidence transcript
According to consumer data shown on a slide in the talk (source not captured), French shoppers particularly want to know where a product comes from.
Speaker GoogleIn Day 2, 14:15 · Focusing on Internationalisation and LocalisationEvidence transcript
Google said that working out a site's localized pages and which countries it targets is one of the difficult, complex tasks for it in indexing.
Speaker GoogleIn Day 2, 14:15 · Focusing on Internationalisation and LocalisationEvidence transcript
In a community speaker's audit case, a premium multifunctional-furniture maker about to be acquired had multilingual sites with clean translations by native speakers and hreflang tags that were in fairly good shape.
Speaker Alizée BaudezIn Day 2, 14:30 · Lightning session G: InternationalisationEvidence transcript
In the same furniture-maker audit, the Dutch site had only a fraction of the conversions of the brand's other language sites, although it showed the same catalogue, the same hero products and the same photography.
Speaker Alizée BaudezIn Day 2, 14:30 · Lightning session G: InternationalisationEvidence transcript
Checking a competitor during the furniture-maker audit, a community speaker found that a large furniture retailer's French and Dutch sites differ a little in the products they show and especially in their photography, with items apparently shown in much smaller rooms on the Dutch site.
Speaker Alizée BaudezIn Day 2, 14:30 · Lightning session G: InternationalisationEvidence transcript
A community speaker said her first guess, that Dutch homes are smaller than French ones, was wrong: Dutch and French homes have about the same floor area per person, and what differs is the type of house.
Speaker Alizée BaudezIn Day 2, 14:30 · Lightning session G: InternationalisationEvidence transcript
A community speaker said about 19% of homes in Europe are terraced houses on several floors, against 58% in the Netherlands; the matching Eurostat figures are 2019 shares of the EU and Dutch population living in semi-detached or terraced houses, not shares of homes.
Speaker Alizée BaudezIn Day 2, 14:30 · Lightning session G: InternationalisationEvidence transcript
In a community speaker's comparison, a typical Dutch home is narrow and spread over several levels, often with very steep, narrow staircases that make furniture harder to install upstairs, while a typical French home has a wide ground floor and usually wide stairs.
Speaker Alizée BaudezIn Day 2, 14:30 · Lightning session G: InternationalisationEvidence transcript
The lesson of the furniture-maker case was that the translation was correct but the target region had never been checked.
“the translation was right, but the region was never checked”
Speaker Alizée BaudezIn Day 2, 14:30 · Lightning session G: InternationalisationEvidence transcript
A community speaker framed international SEO around three signals to settle before working on hreflang: language (what people can read), region (who the content is for) and authority (why local people should trust the site).
Speaker Alizée BaudezIn Day 2, 14:30 · Lightning session G: InternationalisationEvidence transcript
A community speaker said language versions need adjusting for regional variants of one language: 90 is 'quatre-vingt-dix' in France but 'nonante' in Belgium, and Swiss German differs from German, for example in whether the letter ß (Eszett) is used.
Speaker Alizée BaudezIn Day 2, 14:30 · Lightning session G: InternationalisationEvidence transcript
- Extends D2-C562 Day 2: Language versions can also be language-plus-region variants: Google's example site had a generic English page…
Settling the region means deciding who the content is actually for, which shapes how the catalogue is organised, how prices look and which payment options each market gets.
Speaker Alizée BaudezIn Day 2, 14:30 · Lightning session G: InternationalisationEvidence transcript
Of language, region and authority, a community speaker called language easy to settle and region solvable with a little research, while authority (why local people should trust a brand) has to be earned and built over time.
Speaker Alizée BaudezIn Day 2, 14:30 · Lightning session G: InternationalisationEvidence transcript
A community speaker stressed that an hreflang annotation for a country (her example was German for Austria, de-AT) does not by itself make a site established or trusted in that country; local authority has to be worked for.
Speaker Alizée BaudezIn Day 2, 14:30 · Lightning session G: InternationalisationEvidence transcript
A community speaker said the SEO industry has treated hreflang as the hard part of international SEO; hreflang is complicated, but the real hard part is the homework of understanding consumers in each market.
“the hard part is actually doing the homework to understand your consumers”
Speaker Alizée BaudezIn Day 2, 14:30 · Lightning session G: InternationalisationEvidence transcript
A community speaker said the answers about what consumers in each market want expire, because regional differences change over time.
Speaker Alizée BaudezIn Day 2, 14:30 · Lightning session G: InternationalisationEvidence transcript
A community speaker showed a chart of search interest over time for ceiling fans in northern versus southern Europe, saying southern Europeans commonly have them at home while northern Europeans paid them no attention until the previous summer's heat waves (the talk was on 1 October 2026).
Speaker Alizée BaudezIn Day 2, 14:30 · Lightning session G: InternationalisationEvidence transcript
The first of three questions to ask before the technical work of international SEO is which languages, and which language variants, the site actually serves, keeping languages and variants apart.
Speaker Alizée BaudezIn Day 2, 14:30 · Lightning session G: InternationalisationEvidence transcript
The second question before international SEO work is what genuinely differs between the regions of each language, such as photography, content, vocabulary, the way products are presented, pricing, catalogues and payment options.
Speaker Alizée BaudezIn Day 2, 14:30 · Lightning session G: InternationalisationEvidence transcript
The third question is whether you can name three local sources that already treat the brand as present in a country; if you cannot, a community speaker advised not to expand there but to fix the markets you already serve.
“don't bother expanding to another country; just fix the ones you already have”
Speaker Alizée BaudezIn Day 2, 14:30 · Lightning session G: InternationalisationEvidence transcript
A community talk, presented on its author's behalf by a colleague, was about multilingual SEO for languages written in non-Latin scripts, such as Persian and Arabic.
Speaker a second community speakerIn Day 2, 14:30 · Lightning session G: InternationalisationEvidence transcript
Because Arabic and Persian lookalike letters have different code points, a searcher may type one variant of a word while a website's text uses the other.
Speaker a second community speakerIn Day 2, 14:30 · Lightning session G: InternationalisationEvidence transcript
Lookalike Arabic and Persian character variants cause problems for data analysis and keyword research: data for one term can be split across the variants, which makes keyword research less accurate.
Speaker a second community speakerIn Day 2, 14:30 · Lightning session G: InternationalisationEvidence transcript
The display problem of mixing right-to-left and left-to-right text also affects product titles and URLs, the presenter of the non-Latin-script talk said, showing an example from a large Iranian e-commerce site.
Speaker a second community speakerIn Day 2, 14:30 · Lightning session G: InternationalisationEvidence transcript
Used byrequirement DEV-INT-12glossary term Bidirectional text
Keyword research for non-Latin-script languages should ask how people actually type and spell in local search, not only what the right keyword is, because switching keyboards is inconvenient, especially when typing on mobile.
Speaker a second community speakerIn Day 2, 14:30 · Lightning session G: InternationalisationEvidence transcript
The presenter of the non-Latin-script talk said Persian offers far fewer natural link opportunities than English, with fewer publications, niche blogs and websites.
Speaker a second community speakerIn Day 2, 14:30 · Lightning session G: InternationalisationEvidence transcript
For SEO in languages such as Persian, the presenter of the non-Latin-script talk advised accepting different competitive dynamics and basing strategy on the actual maturity of that language's market, not only on the global policy.
Speaker a second community speakerIn Day 2, 14:30 · Lightning session G: InternationalisationEvidence transcript
In the presenter's observation, AI answers to Persian queries are written in Persian but cite some English sources; the presenter explained that Persian content on a topic is often thinner, of lower quality or less relevant, so the systems retrieve from languages with better content, which the presenter called cross-lingual retrieval.
Speaker a second community speakerIn Day 2, 14:30 · Lightning session G: InternationalisationEvidence transcript
- Extends D2-C603 Day 2: Users often assume AI is all-knowing and borderless, but AI is still language-dependent: if an AI answer is…
The non-Latin-script talk concluded that multilingual SEO is not just translation: script, language behaviour and market maturity also matter, and basic SEO tactics, though the same everywhere, must be fitted to each market.
Speaker a second community speakerIn Day 2, 14:30 · Lightning session G: InternationalisationEvidence transcript
Under-served languages were presented as an opportunity: where Google's index holds a lot of spam in a language such as Basque, a site that starts publishing in that language can very likely replace that spam with its own content and rank for those keywords (one clause of the reasoning was inaudible).
Speaker GoogleIn Day 2, 15:40 · Deciding what goes in the index?Evidence transcript
What Google's documentation says 6
Google's Search documentation gives notranslate as a rule for a robots or googlebot meta tag or an X-Robots-Tag header, and says the rule opts a page out of all translation features in Google Search.
Publisher Google Search CentralAnnotates Day 2, 10:30 · Controlling indexing
Used byrequirements DEV-IDX-03, DEV-IDX-09glossary term X-Robots-Tag
A 2008 Search Central blog post says a meta tag named google with the value notranslate stops Google Translate from translating any of a page's content.
Publisher Search Central blog (14 October 2008)Annotates Day 2, 10:30 · Controlling indexing
Used byrequirement DEV-IDX-09
Google's Search Help says the language a query is typed in is an important factor in choosing the language of results, alongside interface and device language, location and site owners' annotations, and that Google may also show results in other languages when they are helpful or when there is not enough information in the query's language.
Publisher Google Search HelpAnnotates Day 2, 14:15 · Focusing on Internationalisation and Localisation
Google's spam policies define scaled content abuse as generating many pages mainly to manipulate rankings, with little or no value to users, no matter how they are created, and list automated translating of scraped content among the examples.
Publisher Google Search CentralAnnotates Day 2, 14:15 · Focusing on Internationalisation and Localisation
Used byrequirement DEV-INT-10glossary term Scaled content abuse
- Extended by D3-C695 Day 3: The cheaper tokens become, the more AI slop is created, and Google counts AI slop as scaled content abuse.
- Extended by D3-C697 Day 3: Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines point out that the tool used to create content is not the problem…
Google's documentation recommends hreflang annotations even when a site's versions differ only by small regional variations within one language, for example English-language content targeted to the US, GB and Ireland.
Publisher Google Search CentralAnnotates Day 2, 14:30 · Lightning session G: Internationalisation
Used byrequirement DEV-INT-08
Google's documentation lists the signals it uses to decide which locale a page targets: ccTLDs, hreflang statements, server location, and other signals such as local addresses and phone numbers, local language and currency, links from other local sites and Business Profile signals.
Publisher Google Search CentralAnnotates Day 2, 14:30 · Lightning session G: Internationalisation
Used byrequirement DEV-INT-08
Analysis by the author 13
International sites should remove notranslate from their templates unless translation must be prevented: the robots or googlebot form switches off Google Search's translation features, and John Mueller said the form named google also blocks Chrome's translation for visitors who do not read the language.
Author Ibrahim AnjroAnnotates Day 2, 10:30 · Controlling indexing
Used byrequirement DEV-IDX-09
For German-language sites serving Germany, Austria and Switzerland, add hreflang with region codes (de-DE, de-AT, de-CH) and make the country pages differ in more than boilerplate (prices, shipping, legal details), or expect Google to cluster them and show one.
Author Ibrahim AnjroAnnotates Day 2, 11:55 · Handling web duplication
Used byrequirement DEV-INT-08
Check AI Overviews and AI Mode with native-language queries in each target market, not with translated English keywords, and compare with the country breakdown of Search Console's generative AI performance report; topics where competitors are cited and you are not point to missing or weak local content.
Author Ibrahim AnjroAnnotates Day 2, 14:15 · Focusing on Internationalisation and Localisation
Used byrequirement DEV-MON-07
- Extends D1-C124 Day 1: Google's launch post for the Generative AI performance reports in Search Console (3 June 2026; rolled out to…
Treat machine translation as a first draft: have a native speaker review it and adapt dates, calendars and units before publishing, because unreviewed bulk translation that adds little value can also fall under Google's scaled content abuse policy.
Author Ibrahim AnjroAnnotates Day 2, 14:15 · Focusing on Internationalisation and Localisation
Used byrequirement DEV-INT-10
- Extends D1-C048 Day 1: The answer is not a claim that Google detects AI text. It says ranking favours text that reads as natural to…
Localise the trust signals on product pages, not only the words: if the findings shown hold for your category, lead with reviews in the US, brand reputation elsewhere in Europe, expert certifications in Germany and origin information in France, and test the order per market.
Author Ibrahim AnjroAnnotates Day 2, 14:15 · Focusing on Internationalisation and Localisation
When translations and hreflang are clean but one country version converts far worse, compare that market's product range, photography and delivery or installation constraints with local competitors before changing anything technical.
Author Ibrahim AnjroAnnotates Day 2, 14:30 · Lightning session G: Internationalisation
Re-check regional demand for core product categories at least once a year, for example by comparing regions and seasons in Google Trends, because climate, housing or habits can shift what a market wants.
Author Ibrahim AnjroAnnotates Day 2, 14:30 · Lightning session G: Internationalisation
Treat hreflang as a way to show the right language version, not as a market-entry signal: before launching a country version, make sure local publications, partners or directories already mention the brand, and localise pricing and payment options.
Author Ibrahim AnjroAnnotates Day 2, 14:30 · Lightning session G: Internationalisation
List language variants such as fr-FR and fr-BE or de-DE and de-CH separately in a site's language inventory, and give each its own vocabulary and spelling review instead of reusing one translation for every country.
Author Ibrahim AnjroAnnotates Day 2, 14:30 · Lightning session G: Internationalisation
For Persian and Arabic keyword research, look up each lookalike-character spelling of a term separately and add up the volumes, and check which variant the site's own content uses.
Author Ibrahim AnjroAnnotates Day 2, 14:30 · Lightning session G: Internationalisation
The lower selection bar in under-served languages is an opening for content written for that market, not for machine translation at scale: index selection also applies spam signals, and Google's spam policies count generating many pages from scraped content through automated transformations such as translating, with little value for users, as scaled content abuse.
Author Ibrahim AnjroAnnotates Day 2, 15:40 · Deciding what goes in the index?
Used byrequirement DEV-INT-10
Compare candidate keywords in Google Trends for the exact country or region where the page should rank, because the higher-interest wording can differ between markets that share a language.
Author Ibrahim AnjroAnnotates Day 2, 16:20 · Google Trends
The regional search interest maps in Google Trends give a quick first check of demand by country or region before localising content for a new market.
Author Ibrahim AnjroAnnotates Day 2, 16:20 · Google Trends