Removing a language

This thread is resolved. Here is a description of the problem and solution.

Problem:
The client wanted to know if removing the English language from their multilingual website would improve the Google indexing for their primary audience in Scandinavian countries, as the English version of the site was appearing in search results.
Solution:
We advised the client that disabling the English language from the front end should hide its content from Google's crawling bots, which could potentially improve the indexing for the remaining languages. We recommended not to remove the language completely, as it might be useful in the future. However, if the client decides to proceed with the removal, we provided a link to our documentation for guidance:

How to completely remove a language from your site

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Tagged: Exception

This topic contains 1 reply, has 2 voices.

Last updated by Mihai Apetrei 1 year, 2 months ago.

Assisted by: Mihai Apetrei.

Author	Posts
February 23, 2024 at 8:27 pm #15339320
andreS-50	Tell us what you are trying to do? I have a swedish page and it is translated to Finnish, Danish, Norwegian and English. As I do not have any customer that is outside the Scandinavian countries I consider to remove the English language. Especially since google shows the English search result when I search for the webpage name "my little meal". This means that the Swedish organic customers end up in the English webpage. My question. I have just deactivated English on my page at the moment. Should I remove it to generate a "better index for the page that google will work on? Is there something I should think of if I should remove the language? What is the link to your site? hidden link
February 23, 2024 at 9:50 pm #15339544
Mihai Apetrei WPML Supporter since 03/2018 Languages: English (English ) Timezone: Europe/Bucharest (GMT+03:00)	Hi there. Disabling the language from the front end should also hide content from the Google bot that's crawling the site. So I don't think you should remove the language completely (you might also want to re-use it in the future maybe). In case you still want to remove it, I am also sharing some helpful documentation: - https://wpml.org/faq/how-to-completely-remove-a-language-from-your-site/ Mihai Apetrei