Multilingual Redirection

[Angelos_Savvaidis]

Hey there awesome Mozzers,

I have a site that it automatically redirects people by using geolocation ( i know that probably is not good ) to the various languages of the site.

I just wanted to know

1. Is 301 or 302 the best option? ( I've heard that for language re-directions 302 is the best case scenario )

2. My main page for example is www.example.com and it automatically redirects with a 301 to www.example.com/en for any language that is not there. What is the best case scenario? Leave it to redirect to /en or just leave it go to the root page www.example.com.

[Angelos_Savvaidis]

Hey there Patrick,

Thanks a ton for responding to my question.

I too indeed have the hreflang tags within my site but still use a redirection. I will try changing that as soon as possible then.

Also what kind of redirection should i use if someone chooses another language in my site?

Right now the redirection is set as a 301. I have heard a lot of chatter talking about a 302 redirection.

Any opinions?

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

I would read this piece from Moz on International SEO. Reason being:

"Don't use machine translations and don't automatically redirect a user to a different language based on location. It's fine to suggest an alternate language site, but you don't know (without asking) if that English-language searcher in France is an expat, a student of foreign language, or someone who's lost on the internet."

Do you gave hreflang or language tags on the site variations?  You should also country target those variations in both Google and Bing so that crawlers know where those site variations are supposed to target. This will help with your international SEO efforts and region targeting.

Hope this helps! Good luck!