: Language redirect affecting pagerank and search listing? Preface We have a number of sites that use the same redirect mechanism across the board. We recently transitioned one site from non-localised

@Heady270

First, your PageRank went to 0 because you changed URLs and Google needs to assign PageRank to the new URL. Actually, they have already done this internally, but it won't show up in PageRank checkers and the Google Toolbar until they next refresh the publicly visible data. The last time they did so was in December 2013. All URLs created after that will appear to have zero PageRank.

Redirecting from the root of your domain to a subdirectory is absolutely fine. It sounds like you have thought through the redirect cases carefully. The only one that is worrying to me for SEO is the special case for bots. You might want to remove that particular rule and treat bots just like any other user agent. Google considers any special rule for bots to be "cloaking" and may penalize your site for it. If bots do send appropriate language headers, I don't see why you wouldn't want to redirect them to the most relevant language anyway.

The most important thing about language redirects is that you should never redirect from one language to another. Consider the case of a French user that lands on a German page (/de). You should not automatically redirect to /fr because maybe they:


are bilingual and are happy with either
have the an inappropriate browser setting (users often install an English browser especially)
only speak German but are visiting an internet cafe in France


Preventing users from being able to get the content they want is a big no-no. Instead you can put a notice at the top of the page in a large prominent box that says (in French):


A French version of this page is available. Click here to use it instead.

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