Bing Geo-Targeting With Meta Language Tag

A Bing Community thread has one webmaster who had his meta language tag set to the UK and he paid for it.

Supposedly, Microsoft's Bing plays close attention to that meta tag and in the case of Joomla, the default might be set to GB.

Brett Young from the Bing webmaster support team suggested to the webmaster to change the meta tag to:

<meta http-equiv="content-language" content="en-us">

Brett said specifically, with Joomla, "I suggest adding the following meta tag to your home page header and verify that there are no tags pointing to "en-gb"--especially if you are using the Joomla CMS."

It seems like this is a common issue webmasters run into when using Joomla. So I thought I point it out here. I believe Google pays less attention to the meta tag, so it might not be an issue with Google.

Forum discussion at Bing Community.

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posted rustybrick in Microsoft MSN Search at July 21, 2009 8:45 AM Comments (6)

Comments

Historically, meta tags for language and country have been less reliable than inferring the language or country directly. For example, lots of webmaster also just copy/paste from a friend's template without checking the meta tag values. The unreliability of the meta tags is why Google tends not to use them or give them less weight.

Posted by Matt Cutts at July 21, 2009 09:21

Nice to have that validation from Google, again. Thanks.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at July 21, 2009 09:23

Yup yup. That's one of the big reasons to ask in the webmaster console--people are deliberately choosing to give info, so it's more likely to be accurate than meta tags that might have been copied or set by some default software setting.

Posted by Matt Cutts at July 21, 2009 09:30

I'll be updating my meta tags across all my sites!

Posted by Rob Abdul at July 21, 2009 16:43

Apparently you should use a Country and Region tag. In my case (Mexico) I use;

Posted by Alex Angelico at September 3, 2009 18:24

(here I go again)
Apparently you should use a Country and Region tag. In my case (Mexico) I use:

Posted by Alex Angelico at September 3, 2009 18:45