: Google displays wrong language on multi language website because it takes cookies into consideration I have a multiple language website that uses both subdomains and cookies to display the right

Posted in: #Cookie #Googlebot #GoogleSearch #GoogleSearchConsole #Internationalization

I have a multiple language website that uses both subdomains and cookies to display the right language. Here is the logic on the website:

de subdomain will display the German version
fr subdomain will display the French version
ru subdomain will display the Russian version
en subdomain will display the English version

When any of this domain is visited, it displays the appropriate language and sets a cookie. Then when a user visits our root domain (ourdomain.com or ourdomain.com), it still displays the language set in the cookie. The only way to reset the language to English is to visit the subdomain en.ourdomain.com or to delete the cookie.

We have implemented this logic to make sure that a visitor will see the language he selected even if he visits the root domain. The problem is that Google is using the cookie and is displaying the wrong language in SERP because it seems to crawl one of our subdomain website (like de.ourdomain.com), then crawl our root domain and finds the german version on our root domain.

We are using the <link> rel="alternate" lang="en"</link> tag to specify the language but that still doesn't solve our cookie problem. Is there anything I can do to ask Google to not consider cookies before it crawls our root domain website?

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