Google announced better support for webmasters to communicate their multilingual content to Google with a new link element markup.

Googler, Pierre Far, said on Google +:

Here is how it works:

Imagine you have an English language page hosted at http://www.example.com/, with a Spanish alternative at http://es.example.com/. You can indicate to Google that the Spanish URL is the Spanish-language equivalent of the English page in one of two ways:

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

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="es" href="http://es.example.com/" />

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"

If you have multiple language versions of a URL, each language page in the set must use rel="alternate" hreflang="x" to identify the other language versions. For example, if your site provides content in French, English, and Spanish, the Spanish version must include a rel="alternate" hreflang="x" link to both the English and the French versions, and the English and French versions must each include a similar link pointing to each other and to the Spanish site.

Forum discussion at Google +.

Image credit: Globe icon from ShutterStock.