[leoc]

> Whilst this may be surprising to some people on HN, this happens all of the time to sites who build links in an unnatural way.

What (if anything) happened between Google and Reddit, by the way? I remember Google results being stuffed with basically identical versions of the same Reddit comments pages (due to Reddit's language-localisation scheme: it.reddit.com , pl.reddit.com and so on), and then big chunks of Reddit (in all language versions) apparently becoming invisible in those Google results.

[itsprofitbaron]

Reddit tried to resolve it through, a code level setting of the lang within their source code. However, Google ignores all code-level language information including lang attributes and document type definitions (DTD)[1] etc because, some CMSes set this automatically.

However, Google over the years have also worked on their international/localisation identification of sites. As a result they allow webmasters to geotarget them within WMTs[2] which seems to resolve the Reddit issue.

Having said that, there are other methods to fix the issue as well such as using the geotarget option within WMTs to using the rel alternate tag etc.

[1] http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2010/03/working...

[2] https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/62399