- This website documented the fall of Catalan and Basque between 2022-2023 in the search results of Google. Something that had some repair. Recently, from some studies that have come from Catalonia, we have known some reasons for these languages to appear less in the searches. On the one hand, in some Google parameters, there was a "trampilla." On the other hand, there are bilingual companies in Catalonia that prevent the appearance of the results of pages of Catalan approvals.
What Google did (or has)
On May 28, an explanatory document of the Google search algorithm was filtered into the network. A Catalan programmer analyzes the problem of linguistic searches.
According to this reading by Forat Negre, over the language of the user and search, in many contexts the language of the country predominates; in most cases the countries are states (Spain is one of those regional entities for Google, not Euskal Herria or Catalonia).
Forat Negre has also found a sign of some code changes to be introduced in October 2022. The chronology coincides with the more or less serious problems that began then for Catalan and Basque.
Domestication position of some Catalan companies
Another developer working with Catalan technologies has expanded the data: some companies intentionally block Catalan. In other words, they have pages in Catalan on their multilingual websites, but through the document robots.txt they ask the search engines not to explore the pages in Catalan (Google and others).
Robots.txt is a document or feature that is found on most websites, offering instructions to search engines about what to index and what not on their web. It is done for practical purposes so that users who use search engines can locate you via Google.
Reviewing public documents Robots.txt, friend Wecoc1 has announced that there are Catalan companies that do not want their contents to be indexed in Catalan. For example, the manufacturers of plumbing products from the Roca baths, as shown in the figure above.
In fact, there you have the document Robots de Roca, and you will see that the pages that can be marked in Euskera (the 'eu' is the international ISO code of the Basque Country) are also cut... Curious, because URLs like https://www.roca.es/eu/showrooms are mentioned or others there are no versions in Basque or websites on that site... Did it exist and repented?
Update 7 June: We have been informed that some Basque companies also do so, applied to indexing in Basque, such as Eroski with his robots.txt.