The most common mistakes in creating Multilingual sites

1. The problem may be the search engine issuing an incorrect language version of the site. If there are versions for individual countries that speak the same or even the same languages, Google can direct users from, for example, Portugal to a site designed for Brazilians. The presence of this problem can be traced to Google Analytics, where the geography of visits to language versions of the site will be visible.
Correcting and preventing such a situation will help the use of the attributes «hreflang» and «alternate», which will allow Google to display the correct language versions in its output depending on the user’s language and belonging to a specific region.

2. Untranslated (or incorrectly translated) «description» is also often found when creating a site in different languages.
Unlike a similar problem, with interface elements that are visible to visitors of a web resource and can influence their opinion about it, an inappropriate language version of the «description» or containing a meaningless set of words obtained from an automatic translator is not visible to them. But its content is very clearly visible to the bots of search engines and can be perceived by them as spam, which definitely has a bad effect on the results of website promotion.

Therefore, do not be lazy to take care of the good translation of this meta tag for all site pages without exception in different languages.

3. Often found incomplete or incorrect translation of the website interface. In such cases, the site’s multilingual content, instead of adding credibility to it, gives reason to laugh at the mistakes of foreign visitors, for whom the multilingual version of the site was created.
For this purpose, it is better not to use automatic translation services.

4. Many developers are too lazy to read the recommendations of the Google Search Console for multilingual sites:

Try to pre-study guides from Google on this topic, which answer almost all the questions that arise during the creation of the site in different languages.