After watching a hundreds of threads about multilanguage website I haven't found an answer to my specific problem, so I think its not a common issue and I must have done something terribly wrong ;-)

We have a brand.com website in DE main language and the following subfolders:

• /de/ = canonical of / + redirect to /
• /it/
• /en/

When I crawl google.com for EN keywords or google.it for IT keywords then I get as results the homepage in German language (both title and description) as the top result with no trace of the /it/ or the /en/ homepage.

Is this because /it/ and /en/ both needs a separate link building strategy?

I've already configured Google webmaster tool into the following way:

• brand.com, no language preference
• brand.com/de/, de language
• brand.com/it/, it language
• brand.com/en/, en language

Perhaps having "/" as DE main page is it wrong and I should use a different approach? i.e. like having "/" to be a 301 to /de/ instead ?

Thanks in advance.