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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.
Comments:
Matt Cutts
07/21/2009 01:21 pm
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.
Barry Schwartz
07/21/2009 01:23 pm
Nice to have that validation from Google, again. Thanks.
Matt Cutts
07/21/2009 01:30 pm
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.
Rob Abdul
07/21/2009 08:43 pm
I'll be updating my meta tags across all my sites!
Alex Angelico
09/03/2009 10:24 pm
Apparently you should use a Country and Region tag. In my case (Mexico) I use; <meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en-MX" /> <meta name="Country" content="Mexico" /> <meta name="Geography" content="Mexico" />
Alex Angelico
09/03/2009 10:45 pm
(here I go again) Apparently you should use a Country and Region tag. In my case (Mexico) I use: <p><meta http-equiv="content-language" content="en-mx"><br /> <meta name="Country" content="Mexico" /><br /> <meta name="Geography" content="Mexico" /><br /> </p>
American Web Hosting
12/26/2010 05:26 am
I have A language For USA and just doesn't work. I have been thinking that it is all about big brands and site overall rank the most important reason to appear in the first two page results. Less or more attention just doesn't do the trick, pay is the key point. That means web content, nicer page design and second hand domains will disappear soon vs video and live media.
Friv
10/21/2011 07:21 am
thanks for share great articles . I will update for my site.
Tuan Nguyen
04/12/2012 03:53 am
Brett said specifically, with Joomla ?