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Auto-Redirecting Homepage on Multilingual Site
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The website has an auto-redirecting homepage on a multilingual site. Here is some background:
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User visits the site for first time > sent to javascript age verification page with country of origin selector. If selects "France" then served French page (.com/fr-fr/). If selects any other country, then served English page (.com/en-int/).
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A cookie is set, and next time the user visits the site, they are automatically served the appropriate language URL.
1st Question: .com/ essentially does not exist. It is being redirected to .com/en-int/ as this is the default page. Should this be a 301 redirect since I want this to serve as the new homepage?
2nd Question:. In the multilingual sitemap, should I still set .com/ as the hreflang="x-default" even though the user is automatically redirected to a language directory?
According to Google, as just released here: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2014/05/creating-right-homepage-for-your.html "automatically serve the appropriate HTML content to your users depending on their location and language settings. You will either do that by using server-side 302 redirects or by dynamically serving the right HTML content. Remember to use x-default rel-alternate-hreflang annotation on the homepage / generic page even if the latter is a redirect page that is not accessible directly for users."
So, this is where I am not clear. If use a 302 redirect of .com/ to either .com/en-int/ or .com/fr-fr/, won't I then lose the inbound link value and DA/PA of .com/ if I just use a 302? Note: there is no .com/ at this moment.
Any advice is appreciated. Thanks,Alex
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If you don't use hreflang="x-default" there can be some potential search issues:
1. Searchers of a particular language/region aren't shown a URL tailored to them when one exists.
Google might show:
www.example.com/en-us/product-item (in Google UK - searcher was searching for example product item)2. Search results might disply two similar URLs from yoru site, confusin users
3. Search engine might not be aware of all language variations
However, if the main index page (www.example.com) doesn't exist and has been 301 redirected to en-us then you can keep en-us as your default page and use .
Or, if you've have a URL that doesn't consistently serves content in one language - perhaps it redirects to different language pages based on the user's IP, or it dynamically serves different language content on the same page, or it's a page which only asks the user to select their preferred home page then your hreflang value can be x-default. x-default signals to search engines that the URL's language is broad, rather then specific
Hreflang doesn't harm in any which way even if you're using proper redirects
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