Google not indexing translated content using url params

Question

I have a website that uses a URL param (http://example.com?lang=es) to translate each page content. I know that this option is not recommended, but technically is the only one I can provide atm.

I have:

• checked the Google article for Multi-regional and multilingual sites,
• make sure each language version is crosslinked with others,
• configured the bot to crawl url param on Google Webmaster Tools,
• and waited for several days,

but Google bot seems to crawl only the English version of the site. Is there anything I'm missing?

Answer 1

You say you have checked Google's multilingual guidelines pages, but have you implemented the rel="alternate" hreflang= mark up, either on the pages source code or in sitemaps?

If not you should do that, as it can help Google discover and understand the connection between your translated pages.

If you haven't already, make sure all your URLs are in a sitemap.xml file and it is submitted in GWT. Google also recently confirmed that the best way for them to discover new URLs and changes to pages is using both sitemap.xml files and also RSS feeds, so you could add these translated pages (and all pages) to an RSS feed and submit to PubSubHubbub. More info here: Best practices for XML sitemaps & RSS/Atom feeds

In Webmaster Tools you could also 'Fetch as Google' to make sure the pages aren't blocked, are crawlable and displaying correctly. Then after fetching you can submit the URLs to Google and they should get crawled and hopefully indexed.

I would make sure to follow all these steps, then wait a week to two to see if they get indexed.