This morning I did a site command (just to check if I had joined the supplemental issue club) and found out that for some reason Google believes one of the pages is written in Japanese.
Though the issue is nothing new (I've seen it bouncing on and off occasionally), I can only wonder how hard it is for search engines to read the code and trust what it says:
<head xml:lang="fi" lang="fi">
...
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
Two very clear statements saying this page is written using a western character set language, Finnish to be more precise. So how come Google thinks this specific page is written in Japanese? I know our website has some quality backlinks from Japanese sites, so most likely this is a side affect from that. But why only this specific page shows "Translate this page" feature (to my knowledge it has zero japanese backlinks)?
So if you happen to be Google engineer reading this, please place this on your to-do list. Google expects webmasters to trust their guidelines, IMO it is only fair for Google to do the same and trust even a little piece of what website owners say about their site's origin.
Google believes the site is written in Spanish: www.cescfabregas.org greetings
My two sites met the same problem. My site written in english, but it shows to translate the page on the google's result.
https://www.the-furniture.net/sell-0-1.html
https://www.protection-film.net
The two sites contain the chinese link. It may be the reason.
Maybe Google just has too much faith in their new Japanese beta translation services? :D
I've seen this a couple times when someone has left a comment in a different language then my declared content-type language - but not from backlinks.
Google guessing wrong language is nothing new to me. It happens a lot in Norway when aspecially Google AdSense thinks pages are in Danish and shows incorrect ads.
Excellent point, 2K, and something that I was never familiar with previously. I wonder why Google would presume that backlinks from a conutry would mean the page/site is written in that language - seems like an almost asinine assumption to me. After all, SEOmoz has links from all over, and many sites get popular in certain regional or language-specific sites before they start receiving attention in the US. I'll bet David Hasselhof's site has lots of German links :)