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English descriptions for foreign language pages on http://www.study-mexico.com

• Our site has seven different language sections. They are listed below. http://www.study-mexico.com/english/1/ http://www.study-mexico.com/German/1/ http://www.study-mexico.com/Japanese/1/ http://www.study-mexico.com/Korean/1/ http://www.study-mexico.com/Mandarin/1/ http://www.study-mexico.com/Portuguese/1/ http://www.study-mexico.com/Spanish/1/ When pages from the non-English pages appear in the search engine results, they often have English in the description. Also, unimportant information - like the date - appears. Here are a couple of examples: Embajada de Canada en Argentina - [ Translate this page ] TEFL & Spanish Programs in Mexico! Oct 01, 2004, Select a Language: English Actions speak louder than words. ... www.study-mexico.com/Spanish/ 10/embajada-canada-argentina.cfm - 35k - Cached - Similar pages Embajada de Canada en Israel - [ Translate this page ] Study in beautiful Guadalajara! Sep 30, 2004, Select a Language: English Ignorance ... www.study-mexico.com/Spanish/ 10/embajada-canada-israel.cfm - 35k - Cached - Similar pages Here is my question. What can we do to improve the relevance of these descriptions? Thanks.

• Answer:

  Dear fullthrottle, The brief descriptions in search engine listings are taken direct from a site's content. A site's content (or more precisely: its source code) is being analyzed automatically by a bot. The bot searches the code to find out what parts will be visible text when the site is displayed on a screen. After all, the visible text usually is the most important element for the visior. He expects to find the search terms the search engine delivered results for. The Google descriptions consist of a site's tagline (the short descriptive text in the bar at the very top of the browser), and the first lines of visible text (unless the search terms point at various sections of the content). For analyzing your problem, I searched for and found one of your sites to get an example to work with: http://www.study-mexico.com/Spanish/10/embajada-canada-israel.cfm I then analyzed the source code and found out that, except for the tagline, the source code lists the first parts of text to display in this order: - The short slogan unter the "Vancouver Language Centre" logo; in this case, it was "Study in sunny Mexico!" - The date - The language change option together with the first language name from the pull-down list - The quotation, in this case "Teaching is the art of assisting discovery. - Mark van Doren" All this visible text comes before any lines referring to the site's actual content. Since search engine bots can't decide what parts of a text are important, the best solution to get useful descriptions of your sites into the Google results is the following: Put a brief paragraph at the top of each site that contains the description you'd like to see in search engine results. This text must appear even before (that means: above) the small slogan, the date, the language selection field, the quotation and the Google field. Use visble text for it! Though it is possible to make text transparent and thus "visible" for the bot, but not for the visitor, search engine bots often recognize this as an attempt to cheat. That is the easiest solution to your problem. And it has the big advantage of being very sound and reliable. I hope that this will help! Regards, Scriptor