: Indexing internationalized pages I've noticed that many websites use different URLs for different languages, e.g. de.wikipedia.org. I thought that was the entire purpose of existance for the Accept-Language

@Steve110

Yes you can totally do that !

Number 1: Using locale parameter for your site to serve different accepted language pages based on where's the visitor is from. You can do this serving the parameters in your .htaccess file. Basically your sites will start with language preferences serving them differently

for example: example.com for a spanish site would be served as es.example.com
You can read more about locale here.
Off course after this you have to use hreflang and Canonization for the locale served contents.

Number 2: In case you don't have access to .htaccess file then you make the content in various other languages for the same content on your site and mark them with proper language tag like this:

In English site <p lang=”en” >Hello My Name is Nell</p>
In Spanish site <p lang=”es”>Hola mi nombre es Nell</p>


which will be automatically crawled as different languages, and you can link these pages to each other so a Spanish visitor can prefer to have Spanish translated content when visiting the English version of it.

You can read more about it here, here and here.

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@Angie530

Google and Bing ignore language headers, and even encoding meta tags. They instead look at the content of page to determine language.

What you need are rel links with hreflang for each country and region. A good sample is visiting etsy.com and doing a view source. You can see they target by country, and sometimes multiple languages per country.

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