Google’s John Mueller said that lesser-used or well-known languages published on the web are not considered low-quality content simply because they are not well known.He said Mastodon “Good content is good content” no matter what language it is written in.
According to Daniel Mealo, “The best recommendation at this time is to avoid risking the perception of low-quality content, even if such pages are intended for a localized and legitimate target audience. , will such pages be deindexed?” Should this type of content be removed because there is no hreflang ISO code to support it? According to John Mueller, the answer is no.
John said, “If this is good content for a niche audience, I will never remove it from the index. Good content is good content. Don’t let your site be ‘punished’ for content in obscure language.” No. “There is no ISO-639-1 code for Ancient Greek, and I dare not suggest removing that content from the web,” he added.
So what if you don’t have an ISO 639-1 code for the language and want to use hreflang? John previously said, “If a language doesn’t have an ISO 639-1 code, there’s no hreflang that can be specified there. A page doesn’t need an hreflang. It doesn’t have to be part of an hreflang. If it’s set, the ranking benefits are is not.”
“Pages can contain words from any language or script. Our system will attempt to properly index and display those words to users who search. No problem,” he added.
forum discussion at Mastodon.