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redirect for language and modReWrite

redirect language

         

bartenbach

5:02 pm on Dec 15, 2006 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Hi ,

I got some difficult questions – maybe someone can help

It´s regarding this site – <snip>
On the index we use a little php 302 to redirect the user to the right language.

Do you think this is “bad” for google , are there better solutions for checking the language?
One Problem we have with that is that we just get listed in English search results – because the google bot get redirected to the English versions..

Next thing is that we use the same url (re/write) for English and German Version
So the url is exactly the same for English and German Version .
( Example /store/bindings-c-25.html same URL for both languages)
I know this is bad – I think we should ad a extra letter to the URL for each language like
store/bindings-c-25-engl.html - Do you think this would work, and if it works , can it be bad for us because if we do that, we will have 1000 new pages in German in one day..

I hope you can understand my English

thx

[edited by: encyclo at 5:28 pm (utc) on Dec. 15, 2006]
[edit reason] no URLs please, see TOS [webmasterworld.com] [/edit]

bill

5:58 am on Dec 20, 2006 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



Language based redirection isn't always in your best interests for the visitors either. I'm based in Japan and run into this all the time when I'm trying to access English content. The Windows Live sites are awash with this senseless redirection and it's probably one of the biggest reasons I don't use those sites. I digress...

If you want to be recognized for local content on Google, then they've told us you should either host locally or use a ccTLD. That doesn't work for all languages, but it's a start for most of them. You could also set the language of the page like so:

Chinese:

<html lang="zh">

Japanese:

<html lang="ja">

etc.