Strange indexing of multi language site

[edwardlewis]

I've been looking at a site which has a strange ranking/indexing issue.

The website has several translated versions of the site for different languages and these translated pages seem to be outranking the UK pages in the UK search results.

All of the translated pages are in sub folders, eg

domain.com

domain.com/fr

domain.com/sv

domain.com/it

domain.com/es

I cant work out how or why Google would see these pages with non english content as more relevant than the UK pages?

One thing I did notice is that there are no meta language tags on there. Could this be the issue?

[MattAntonino]

I don't know why they would outrank but the simplest solution would be to add the hreflang tags to make each search engine see the right domain - that should give /uk a better ranking on google.co.uk and /es rank better on Google.es

Getting the correct hreflang setup should help you on all the different Google variations.