For a few years now, some webmasters have been trying to figure out ways to prevent Google from allowing users to translate their pages with the Google Translate tool. From time to time, webmaster ask if there is a way to prevent Google from displaying the "translate this page" link in the Google search results from showing up. We have such a question at Google Webmaster Help forums just the other day.

Here is a picture of the "Translate this page" option in action:

Did you know there is a tag to prevent Google from showing the "Translate this page" option in the search results?

Google says if "you prefer not have your page translated by Google Translate, just insert the following meta tag into your HTML file:"

<meta name="google" value="notranslate">

However, if you don't want a section of your webpage to be translated, just add "class=notranslate" to any HTML element to prevent that element from being translated.

The question asked in the Google Webmaster Help is that he wants to allow Google to offer this but only for certain languages. For example, he doesn't want to allow users to translate his Spanish words into anything else, because those are product names. It would be neat to have the option of specifying what to translate into which languages, at the webmaster level - but I am not sure how many webmasters would use that feature.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

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