301 redirect to 1 of 3 locations based on browser languge? Is this ok?
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Hi all,
I'm taking over a site that has some redirect issues that need addressed and I want to make sure this is done right the first time.
The problem: Our current setup starts with us allowing both non-www and www pages. I'll address this with a proper rewrite so all pages will have www.
Server info: IIS and runs PHP.
The real concern is that we currently run a browser detection for language at the root and then do a 302 redirect to /en, /ge or /fr. There is no page at the www.matchware.com. It's an immediate redirect to a language folder.
I'd like to get these to a 301(Permanent) redirect but I'm not sure if a URL can have a 301 redirect that can go to 3 different locations.
The site is huge and a site overhaul is not an option anytime soon.
Our home page uses this:
<%
lang = Request.ServerVariables("HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE")
real_lang = Left(lang,2)
'Response.Write real_lang
Select case real_lang
case "en"
Response.Redirect "/en"
case "fr"
Response.Redirect "/fr"
case "de"
Response.Redirect "/ge"
case else
Response.Redirect "/en"End Select
%>Here is a header response test.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
HTTP Request Header
Connect to 87.54.60.174 on port 80 ... ok GET / HTTP/1.1[CRLF] Host: www.matchware.com[CRLF] Connection: close[CRLF] User-Agent: Web-sniffer/1.0.37 (+http://web-sniffer.net/)[CRLF] Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,UTF-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7[CRLF] Cache-Control: no-cache[CRLF] Accept-Language: de,en;q=0.7,en-us;q=0.3[CRLF] Referer: http://web-sniffer.net/[CRLF] [CRLF]
HTTP Response Header
--- --- --- Status: HTTP/1.1 302 Object moved Connection: close Date: Fri, 13 May 2011 14:28:30 GMT Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0 X-Powered-By: ASP.NET Location: /ge Content-Length: 124 Content-Type: text/html Set-Cookie: ASPSESSIONIDQSRBQACT=HABMIHACEMGHEHLLNJPMNGFJ; path=/ Cache-control: private Content (0.12 <acronym title="KibiByte = 1024 Byte">KiB</acronym>)
<title></span>Object moved<span class="tag"></title> # Object Moved This object may be found <a< span="">HREF="/ge">here. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ To sum it up, I know a 302 is a bad option, but I don't know if a 301 is a real option for us since it can be redirected to 1 of 3 pages? Any suggestions?</a<>
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If you feel you need to do this regardless of language, run a PHP if/then script looking for browser language. Based on the language you can then set the 301 right in the script loop.
Header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" );
Header( "Location: http://www.matchware.com/yourlanguagefolder/" );
?>My question though is why would you not have at least one language be the default, and have that at the root home level (www.matchware.com/)
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