First page redirect and search engines

Good job!

Very well written. Thanks!

It should be documented that Locale initial detection options will create BIG BIG troubles with all popular search engines and makes your site looks like the "english" only, if you have english as a language defined. Google, Yahoo and MSN will be detected everytime as an english user.

really - technical there are not so much user friendly options... :-(

1. don't do detection based on browser. this is simply a "no-go". i learned this and never thought about befor... and after our site has been kicked out and only english pages are inside google we removed this and changed to hostname switching. our german content comes slowly back in the search results... (took ~6 months).

2. i only see a few real solutions, i wrote about in a different case (frontpage problem).

A: website owner must choose his default language. This is for e.g. the "default" checked as default language under "admin/locale". If the users comes on the site he will be redirected with HTTP 301 or 302 Status Code to path "de" (if this is the default language under "admin/locale"). if the user switch, they will switch to path "it", "en", "es" and so on. This keep the languages separated whatever the client browsers language is.

B: same es A, but with hostname switching... with this solution you do not need the "en", "it" subdirectory and so on... but you need much hostnames or many domains, where the last may be a logistic and law problem... :-). for e.g. i cannot get a French domain if i'm German and do not have a company in franc. shit happens... but we tryed :-). i'm open minded if someone have an idea how to circumvent this :-))).

C: node switching is another good solution here. But this way do not solve the frontpage (!!!) problem... and you should never fall back to the Italian text of "it/service" if you are in "en/service"... fall back means - write Italian text in a HTML page that is declared as EN in the HTML head.

sum up: never detect anything the client is telling you - your detection will/may be wrong. make sure your server knows what to do and what to send out. This can on the end - only be solved by unique URLs per language.

client side detection should *only* be done if you make sure this is the user XY and his language is for e.g. "IT". You can only do this with authorized users from my point of view... and search engines are every time anonymous :-)

Hello guys,

I have a question: Isnt google crawling the http://host.com/switchuilocale/en?destination=node links?
If it is, then everything must be fine because it can crawl all pages.

Or did I miss something?

Okay, I see. I did a research for portuguese articles on my multilingual page and you are right :-(

Thanks for the tip with disabeling the front page redirect. I hope this will help.

Hi,

Also for the 4.7 version please?

Greetings,
Martijn