: When the page language can be determined by the browser settings, which URLs should go into sitemaps? At this moment our website both uses the language in the url like "en" and localizes the

@Harper822

I want to add that the redirects should be 301's not 302's because 302 stand for "found", but 301's do a permanent redirect and display the correct URL in the address bar for people to be able to bookmark the page in the correct language.

Also, with the accept header, you need to take the language with the highest preference from the list of languages.

See this RFC 2616 - Section 14 - Header Field Definitions www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html
It states the following:


The Accept-Language request-header field is similar to Accept, but restricts the set of natural languages that are preferred as a response to the request. Language tags are defined in section 3.10.

...

Each language-range MAY be given an associated quality value which represents an estimate of the user's preference for the languages specified by that range. The quality value defaults to "q=1". For example,

Accept-Language: da, en-gb;q=0.8, en;q=0.7


would mean: "I prefer Danish, but will accept British English and other types of English."


So your best bet is to write server-side code that takes the value of the accept-language header as input strip the preferred name from the input and then issue a 301 redirect to the proper page based on the code.

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@Looi9037786

I think that what you'll want to do is change the way your system works. If no language is specified in the URL, but you detect the language via the browser settings, then your site should redirect the user to a URL with that language in the path. This is for two reason:

1) Duplicate content. Spiders/Bots will come to test.com/books, test.com/booken, and test.com/en/books URLs, and see the same content at all 3 URLs if the Spider's Accept-Language header is English. For example, Googlebot comes and crawls test.com/books, test.com/booken, and test.com/nl/booken with Accept-Language header of Dutch, Google will see the exact same content at all 3 URLs. The hreflang x-default will not help you, because in your case the "default" is not in fact a default language, but detects which language to display.

2) It solves your problem about not knowing which URL applies to which language, and makes the language hierarchy of your site much more easily understood to bots (and humans). Thus it will make it much more likely that users land on the page that they actually want, without any redirects.

You could go about this in 2 ways. The way that I do with one of my clients is we have the test.com/books as the English variant (and default), however if the user comes to that URL with a Accept-Language that is non-English, and one that we support, we 302 redirect them to test.com/nl/booken. If they're English, we leave them at test.com/books (we don't specify English in the URL, basically. This was not my choice, but my bosses who just didn't want to do it "right" for his own reasons).

Alternatively in your case, you could also redirect English speakers to test.com/en/books which would make it even more explicit to Spiders which URL is which language, and then leave the non-language URL as the only one that would do language detection. This way Google would know that English speakers go to test.com/en/books, Dutch speakers go to test.com/nl/booken, and if the searcher is working in neither of those languages, they go to test.com/books (you really should try to have only one "default" URL) and Google lets you sort out the language on your website.

Then to clean up your old Dutch URL's and retain any link juice from those, you'd probably want to 301 redirect test.com/booken to test.com/nl/booken

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