I have some <span lang="en-us"> problems occuring on 1 of my sites at the moment. It is causing my IntelliTXT not to work, and so I need it fixed. Does anyone know if I can just remove the <span lang="en-us"> & </span> codes from my site altogether without any problems effecting the way that site is spidered / read by search engines etc? Or shall I add something into the meta tag to make sure it gets read as being in English? Will that even work? Any help would be greatly appreciated since my IntelliTXT has dropped about $200 each month I have left it be so far!
Yes, you can remove those. You can put it in the <HTML> element for it to affect all subsequent elements on the page. Like so... <html lang="en"> You can read more here... http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-html401-19991224/struct/dirlang.html#h-8.1.2
Thats what I wanted to hear / read. Thank you! Its best to have some form of language element to all your pages isn't it? Wouldn't show up as being "Translate this page" in Google then would it?
Yes. There are also other ways of doing it, for instance you can use the <META> tag to specify the language of the document... <META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Language" CONTENT="en-us"> or if you're using a server-side scripting language you can send the HTTP Header Content-language to the client... Content-language: en-us But even if you don't specify any language I think Googlebot (and most search engines) are smart enough to determine the language of your document on it's own. I think it only shows "Translate this page" when the Google locale you're using (i.e. US) is different than the language of the document (e.g. French).