Please do go through this link which has a wealth of information and its by Google so nothing better to trust:

But yes for Brazil related pages use

<meta http-equiv="content-language" content="pt-br"> </meta http-equiv="content-language" content="pt-br">

and

Hi,

I understand you dont have two website, but you said somewhere you are using subdomains. For search engines every subdomain is a completely different DNS recored, so treated as a different website.

No one is saying you need to translate your website, however, the changes above need to be done to whatever languages you already have. You would need an army of people to translate to all languages and of course a million USD! Haha!

As I said before, language approach is not enough, you need to use the locale approach too. For example, English is spoken in many countries (like Australia, Canada, US, UK, New Zealand, South Africa). Same as German and a few other languages, so if you dont couple language with country, search engines will get confused.

I hope this helps

Issa

Hi again,

First of all, canonicals are not enough but definitely its good that you use them.

Alternate rel link tag is very important. Read this link please: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077

As for the XML sitemap, do you use the language markup for each link there? If you want to know how to do that follow this link: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2620865

As for the Portugal and Brazil subdomains, using webmaster tools will surely solve this issue, but even with the language rel tag you have to use different language codes, so "pt" is incorrect, you need to specify the locale as well, so "pt-BR" for Brazilian Portuguese and "pt-PT" for European/Continental/Portugal Portuguese

I hope this clears things up.

Sorry there is no easy way

Best,

Issa

Hi Fabrizzo,

There are a few things you will need to do to help Google make a decision of which part of your website (whether its a subdomain or a subfolder). For example on the mobile-friendly website you will need to use the HTML annotation:

And on the desktop site you will need to add the canonical meta:

This way, you are telling google that  these two pages are the same pages, but one is for mobile and the other is for desktop users.

As for countries websites, you this is what Google looks at when they crawl your web pages:

• ccTLDs (country-code top-level domain names).
• Geotargeting settings. You can use the geotargeting tool in Webmaster Tools to indicate to Google that your site is targeted at a specific country. (If you have different subdomains then create a separate profile for each on Webmaster tool and assign each to a different country.)
• Server location (through the IP address of the server). The server location is often physically near your users and can be a signal about your site’s intended audience.
• Other signals. Other sources of clues as to the intended audience of your site can include local addresses and phone numbers on the pages, the use of local language and currency, links from other local sites, and/or the use of Google Places (where available).

(Source for this is Google support article #182192

In your situation i think you will need to 1) Use a dedicated Webmastertools profile for each countries domain. 2) use rel="alternate" hreflang="x" (see examples below)

• HTML link element. In the HTML  section of http://www.example.com/, add a linkelement pointing to the Spanish version of that webpage at http://es.example.com/, like this:

• HTTP header. If you publish non-HTML files (like PDFs), you can use an HTTP header to indicate a different language version of a URL:

  Link: <http: es.example.com="">; rel="alternate"; hreflang="es"</http:>
  

• Sitemap. Instead of using markup, you can submit language version information in a Sitemap.

I hope this helps, let me know if you have more Qs

Best,

Issa