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:frMy 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.
How to make Google recognize language for a multilingual website?
seo;google;html;google search;multilingual
From Google Webmaster Tools Support page on Multi-region and multilingual sitesManaging multilingual versions of your siteMake sure the page language is obviousGoogle uses only the visible content of your page to determine its  language. We dont 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 dont always  make sense and could be viewed as spam. More importantly, a poor or  artificial-sounding translation can harm your sites perception.Make sure each language version is easily discoverableKeep the content for each language on separate URLs. Dont 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 users perceived language.  These redirections could prevent users (and search engines) from  viewing all the versions of your site.Carefully consider your choice of URLGoogle uses the content of the page to determine its language, but the  URL itself provides human users with useful clues about the pages  content. For example, the following .ca URLs use fr as a subdomain or  subdirectory to clearly indicate French content:  http://example.ca/fr/vlo-de-montagne.htmlhttp://fr.example.ca/vlo-de-montagne.htmlSignaling the language in the URL may also help you to discover issues  with multilingual content on your site.Its 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.