: Will a search engine index links with different languages if all apart from the main page are missing the path? Our website www.websitename.com has three languages E.g: www.websitename.com/it
Our website websitename.com has three languages
E.g:
websitename.com/it websitename.com/en websitename.com/fr
by going to each of those links you will get all the remaining pages in the selected language.
You can also visit a page by manually typing the sub-folder at the front and automatically change the language : e.g websitename/en/test.php.
However by default apart from the main page e.g websitename.com/en the rest of the pages won't have the sub-folder appended to the URL so the links will be websitename/test1.php, websitename/test2.php etc.
Will Google or other search engine index the different of those or it will be only one version indexed because they are missing the language in the path?
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To follow on from @moobot 's answer...
The correct way to handle what you're trying to achieve is to serve rel="alternate" hreflang="x" listing all the variations of the same page for different locations/languages in the <head> on a page. And also including the original version as well in the event there is not a version for a specific language/location so Google knows what to show by default.
You can learn more about this at Google.
If the pages are all the same and the language is dynamically changing Google wont be able to crawl the different languages.
When structuring a multi-lingual site, each language must be on separate URLs which Google can easily discover and crawl:
As Google explains:
Make sure each language version is easily discoverable
Keep the content for each language on separate URLs. Don’t use cookies
to show translated versions of the page. Consider cross-linking each
language version of a page. That way, a French user who lands on the
German version of your page can get to the right language version with
a single click.
Avoid automatic redirection based on the user’s perceived language.
These redirections could prevent users (and search engines) from
viewing all the versions of your site.
The recommended structure is using either sub domains, or sub folders, like you already have - But each language must have its seperate page within the sub folders.
More info can be found from Google here: Multi-regional and multilingual sites
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