This website uses Content-Negotiation to present the articles in english or german, depending on the users preferences in her browser. Sadly, search engines like Google only index the english content and thereby reduce the quality of the search results, since searching for german words do not result in hits here.
Here a comparison of a search for the beginning of Arthur’s last article in german and english.
Exceedingly cynical is the “Translate this page [into german]” link on the german version of the (still english) search results.
Others have already found this problem. Charl van Niekerk describes it in September 2005(!) in this article. Apparently nothing has changed since then. I will have to include the langage in the URL, so Google understands the difference too. Very annoying.
Yahoo has the same troubles.
Update (2008-01-30): Meanwhile the german searches do not find anything anymore…
Update (2010-01-25): I’ve upgraded the wordpress to 2.9.1 and installed the qTranslate plugin, which provides the translated articles also via links. Google should now start picking up the german versions again.
Actually, there is another big advantage of not using content-negotiation: (Almost) everyone in your blog target group will have his browser language preferences set to “en”, even if he speaks German more fluently than English, simply because setting it to “de” causes a *lot* of sites to display rubbish (automatically translated content, poorly translated content, outdated content, content with parts missing, …) instead of useful content. If you hadn’t mentioned it in this blog entry, I would have never realized that your blog is available in German, too.