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Rivera981

: Redirect from the main page on multilanguage site I've decided to start developing multilingual web site. Now I'm thinking about the structure. The idea is to use a simple algorithm to find

@Rivera981

Posted in: #301Redirect #302Redirect #Homepage #Multilingual #Redirects

I've decided to start developing multilingual web site. Now I'm thinking about the structure. The idea is to use a simple algorithm to find out what language is most interesting to the visitor when he makes his first visit to the root page, and then forward him to the corresponding address, for example, example.com/en/ for English-speaking audience and example.com/ru/ for Russians.

The question is, how search engines react on such redirect? If this approach does not take away site's reputation, which redirects should I choose: 301 or 302?

I would be very grateful for the reasoned response.

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@Pierce454

Here's some advice from Google's Webmaster Central Blog:


Working with multilingual websites, 19 Mar 2010
New markup for multilingual content, 5 Dec 2011


Basically, what you propose seems like a perfectly fine way to set up a multilingual site.
The most important thing is to make sure that each translated version of a page has a unique URL, and that all of the URLs can be found and indexed by search engines.

One thing you can do to help Google and other search engines to better index your site and understand its structure is to include rel=alternate links between the translated versions of each page. Google, at least, say that they'll use such links to direct visitors to the appropriate translated version of the page.

Ps. As for your question about 301 vs. 302 redirects, I'd use a 302 since the redirect target varies. (Don't forget to add the appropriate HTTP Vary header too.) Using a 302 redirect also means that Google will tend to show the root page URL rather than the language-specific URL in search results, which is presumably what you want.

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