One of the recommended method to increase our search engine’s rank is by having as many inbound links as possible, especially from sites that have higher pagerank (for Google) than ours. But apparently, not all inbound links are good. Bad inbound links even resulted on the low search result on search engine.

This article, Warning: Mass Local Language Inbound Links Can Damage Your Health, covers it up. It explained that too many inbound links from local language website can mess up our rank in search engine’s result.

First, let’s see the background (quoted from the article):

We found this out accidentally. The background is as follows. Google chooses the language of the site through 4 main factors. The physical location of the webserver (IP number), the top level domain name - ‘ .de’ for instance, the meta language tag(s), where the incoming links come from and also the actual language of the text.

Those are the four main factors that Google uses to identify the language of website. Now what happen if Google’s crawler found out that there are many inbound links to our site that come from local language website? Google may ‘regret’ our website original language and think that our website language is the same as the most local language website that have inbound links to our site!

Normally you’d think one of these factors could not override the rest. However, inbound links can override all other factors into duping Google that the page is of a different language than it actually is. This has disastrous consequences, for example if a German page focusing on German language readers gets a highly disproportionate amount of links from english language sites. Google ignores the fact the server is in Germany, the top level domain is ‘.de’, the meta language tag is “de” and considers the site english - which results in dropping a lot in google.de but rising in Google.com.

Furthermore, that article give an example of the result of having too many local language inbound links:

If you come across an english language page with “translate this page” in the google reults and it fails to rank well then it will most likely mean you have too many links from foreign websites. This can happen through link purchase or through one of the many link networks for example.

How about your site? The simplest way to check it is by searching your site on both main Google search engine (Google.com) and Google local search engine. For example, I check this site (FunPonsel.Com) on Google.Com and Google.Co.Id (Indonesian, since I used to post using Indonesian language in the past and also having some inbound links from Indonesian-language website). First I’m using “funponsel” as the keyword. Both search engine returned 10,400 search result. Next, I try using “inurl:funponsel.com” as the keyword. Again, both returned the same result, 9750 search result.

Couple months ago, before I started posting in English, I remember correctly that search result for FunPonsel on Google.Com is not as good as on Google.Co.Id. So I guess I’m making the right decision to post completely in English language :p

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