Specifying content language...

[crazyluv]

I can't find much information on this and am very curious about it.

How do search engines like Google tell which language your page is in (Spanish, French, etc.)?
You know when you go to the advance features and choose to have only English or Spanish results.

I'm asking because I am interested in developing a Spanish website and when I did a little investigating I could not find a logical answer.

I know about the lang attribute and the content-language header but when I looked at the source code of some of the page that were produce by my HTML - Spanish only- search; some pages didn't have either and I couldn't see any reason/way for Google to know that, that page is in Spanish.

 

[crazyluv]

ugg! I hadn't seen (well noticed) the search engine seccion of this forum, or realised how much my question was related to it; until I saw it. So maybe this should be placed there? Darn now I feel stupid.

 

[abdulmueid]

this can be done by using meta tags to define the character-set you are using in your page.
For example:

<meta http-equiv="charset" content="iso-8859-1">

you can google the character-set codes for your language and replace "iso-8859-1" with your language code.