: How to serve for International Googlebots if we redirect users to subdomains for language matching? So, we have a site and a few sub-domains with content in different languages and we're using

@Bryan171

First of all, beware: canonical and hreflang at the same time sounds dangerous. You would have to use canonical only for duplication within the same language.

Back to the main topic: Automatic redirection is not a good idea...

You can read this from Google's documentation for international targeting:


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.


I strongly recommend to:


Use hreflang
Having links on a language switcher with do follow so the bot can crawl all the versions
Not using canonical between language versions
Implement a popup based country selector as sarenza.com does, leaving the user the decision of remaining in the actual market/language or changing to the right one.


Regarding the points in bold:

- Accept-Language

Could be useful for showing a message to the user telling them you have a different version of the content and then show a country/language selection popup as Sarenza.com does but never redirecting the user.
Depending on the logic, it could be more useful to use a geoip database, if your site is an ecommerce probably you prefer to care for the market and not the language of the user (as the example does, see screenshot), on the other hand, if your site is only about content and the subdomains are not mapped to a market but only to a language, then it's ok to use accept-language.
Make sure the code (probably a hidden div with the message) is at the end of the body so it does not add noise to the content of the page.



- Content-Language:
Google does not use content-language neither other meta fields to guess the content language, they use their own algorithm to detect even if you have several languages in a single url.
The answer for this is: not to use

- Vary: Accept-Language:
Here it depends on your cache solution, I'm afraid it's not possible to give a "good-for-all" question. I recommend reading this question about vary:accept language in StackOverflow and this about the misuse of vary
If you implement the accept language with a popup that changes depending on users' language settings and you have full page cache, then you would need to tell the proxies that a different version of accept-language produces a different cache version. In this case example it seems necessary.

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