Several of my site's pages are appearing in search results with [Translate this page] next to it. When I click that it takes me to Google Translate and translates my page from Catalan to English.The pages are in English but have a couple of foreign words (actually Japanese romanisations, not Catalan) that appear to be tripping Google up.A few weeks ago I set the html tag to <html lang=en> which from research appears to be the best method to specify the language of a document. Google has cached the pages with this attribute but it is still offering to translate.More research led me to a notranslate attribute which prevents translation entirely: <html lang=en class=notranslate>. The problem now is users cannot translate from English to their desired language!Are there any other solutions that force Google to parse my site as English only?
How can I prevent Google mistakenly offering to translate a page?
seo;google;google translate
Google does not use language meta-data since we've found that it's generally incorrect. Using HTTP headers, HTML meta tags or element-level lang-attributes does not have an impact on Google's language recognition, so unless you want to do that for other purposes (eg screen-readers), you can probably skip on that.One thing to keep in mind is that Google has no problem recognizing multiple languages per page. So even if we should recognize that a part of the page is say in Italian (perhaps when you write about Italian hotels), and we show a translate this page link in the search results, we'll probably still be able to recognize that it's mostly in English. A simple way to check that is to use the advanced search options to select a specific language and do a site:-query for your site. 