Ranking in Google for Specific Language

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Neeraj Pandey: Hi, I am not able to understand regarding some news points , would be thankful if u help....
  1- I am having bangla news website in India so title tags are in English but the content is in bengla language. Now I want to expand to bangla desh so how to use href lang.
  2- I am getting good traffic to my website in india , it ranks in India English search engine but not in India Bengali so should I mention en-in in hreflang or bd-in ?
  I know that search engine knows this website content is in other lang and title tags are in English how long it is correct?
  If I am making some changes may I loose the ranking that I have in India English? ( because in India Bengali we not ranking)
  Thanks
• 
  Federico Sasso: alternate/hreflang is to be used only when distinct pages (and URLs) are available in different languages for the same content. This doesn't seem to be your case in my understanding.
  
  I have to point out also that alternate/hreflang is not much about giving a ranking boost, it's more about helping the search engine sorting out which of your pages (same content, different languages) is more suited to pick for the user's SERP based on user's "accept-language" HTTP header, IP geolocation and google site version.
  (btw, I'm under the impression a lot of Indian users keep their browser language setting as "English" even if it's not their native language; this would probably impact localized SERPs).
  
  Having mixed languages is not a normal situation to be in. Before changing that however, there's a lot to be assessed:
  
  + you say you're getting good traffic for English speaking Indian users, right? Are you targeting the correct people? Are they actually interested in Bangla contents? (Bounce Rate and other metrics could help you here)
  
  + You certainly are better suited than I am to know about querying habits of Indian people; while English is widespread in India as a second-third language, only a tiny fraction of it's population uses it as first language, do Indians have the habit to query SEs in English even if it's not their native language, to search for non-English content?
  You very likely also are aware whether you are ranking well for Indian English SERP because your contents are prominent and helpful, or just because your titles made you find a smaller pond with little competition.
  
  To better target Bengali-speaking users, I'd probably use titles in Bengali language. That would almost certainly deep dive your ranking in Indian English SERPs. It would probably target a larger pond though... your call.
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  Neeraj Pandey: Thanks +Federico Sasso​​ nice comments but let me explain this to u with example... In India people search Bengali news paper or Hindi news paper ( the searches are made in English language for other news paper because other language fonts are different and people don't want to change fonts ) so obviously search volume for these news paper is much higher as compared with that particular language search volume but they have the content in Bengali the same way title - Hindi news paper but the content is in hindi so what most news agencies doing- they have title tags in English like bangla news paper India bangla news paper ( may be in Bengali language it could be written differently but due to traffic and search volume seos target this ... My confusion was - seowise is it good to use eng lan in title and h1 tags content and interlinking in Hindi?
  2- if OK then the homepage will be called ?-in in hreflang ??
• 
  Federico Sasso: +Neeraj Pandey, I find quite interesting the font thing.
  
  Do you mean only the home page is in English, and all other content articles are in Bengali (content and title too), and that people search generically for [bengali news paper] or [hindi news paper] to find your home page?
  
  If that's the case:
  
  + again, alternate/hreflang is meant for when there are multiple version of the same page in different languages, using with only one language page doesn't make sense.
  
  + if what I've understood is the correct scenario, you could create two versions of the home page, responding to two different URL (e.g. / and /bn/) and tagging the two with the two links
  <link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="..yourdomainurl../" />
  <link rel="alternate" hreflang="bl" href="..yourdomainurl../bn/" />
  
  that should work to preserve your ranking with the English version, and also target the Bengali queries.
  
  You also mentioned expanding to Bangladesh; for that, a better chance would be having a generic top level domain (e.g. .com) instead a ccTLD (e.g. .in), I don't know what's your case.
• 
  Neeraj Pandey: Thank you for this discussion but it still not cleared me.. I tell here my domain is gtld correct but if you search in India ( India news in hindi / Bengali news etc.) These keywords in English have good search volume so if you pick the news websites from google.co.in you will see that news websites are having the articles in bangla or Hindi entire page is in that language but where they could have made title tag in bangla or Hindi words they are using complete English in title tags also would let u know that for Hindi news though people want to see Hindi news but even they use English to search them like Delhi news in Hindi so these news agencies are targeting English keywords for these Hindi news .. I wanted to know if it is good seo wise second point was in gtld our homepage of bangla website ( content is in bangla and title tag is bangla news means english ) is ranking in 3 positions and driving very good traffic so I wanted to expand and target bangla desh with a new page for bangla news of their country in such case what should I use for my Hindi webpage having title in English in hreflang ( please note that this page driving good traffic from keywords like Hindi news paper news in Hindi etc and I don't want to lose traffic)
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  Neeraj Pandey: Easier way- if in USA my website content is in espanish and because I don't find any search volume for Spanish words being used for query but it has good search volume for English keywords like Spanish website for x or Spanish language website ( where the content is in Spanish but the website using complete English title tag) so what should I call this page in hreflang tag es-us or en-us ?? because I am ranking in English queries though I am relevant but I am Spanish and the query is being made not in Spanish but in English, I also don't want to lose the traffic I am getting
• 
  Federico Sasso: Hi +Neeraj Pandey
  I ran a few queries on google.co.in and seen what you mean.
  
  About first point:
  What is not normally SEO-wise (i.e. mixing two languages: title and description in English and Hindi or Bangla in content) seems to work in your country, because there is actually matching user intention.
  So my suggestion is: stick to what works.
  
  About second point:
  Let's stick to your example of a separate page to target English queries in Bangladesh with localized news in Bangla for Bangladesh.
  In this case I'd tag such page with both "bn-bd" and "en-bd", and would probably decide to continue using the generic ISO-639-1 language codes "en" and "bn" to tag the Indian version (supposing that's where we want to attract queries from India and worldwide, but you might decide differently).
  
  So that's what I would add to both pages:
  
  <link rel="alternate" hreflang="bn-bd" href="..yourdomainurl../bd/" />
  <link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-bd" href="..yourdomainurl../bd/" />
  <link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="..yourdomainurl../" />
  <link rel="alternate" hreflang="bn" href="..yourdomainurl../" />
  
  Having used alternate/hreflang shouldn't impact your existing ranking in India for the English queries.
  Of course, we can use alternate/hreflang only because we have two distinct pages/URLs for the search engine to sort out, otherwise it wouldn't make sense.
  
  I'd also geo-target in Google Search Console the content of subfolder /bd/ to Bangladesh.
  
  Let's see what the panelists will say. Hopefully they might have direct experience for your country, which I unfortunately lack.
• 
  Neeraj Pandey: Very nice +Federico Sasso​ this is where I was confused .. Thanks a lot for clearing my this confusion.
• 
  Neeraj Pandey: +Federico Sasso​ I will try to be available in this Thursday hangout