Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Best practice to redirects based on visitors' detected language
-
One of our websites has two languages, English and Italian.
The English pages are available at the root level:
www.site.com/ English homepage www.site.com/page1
www.site.com/page2The Italian pages are available under the /it/ level:
www.site.com/it Italian homepage www.site.com/it/pagina1
www.site.com/it/pagina2When an Italian visitor first visits www.mysit.com we'd like to redirect it to www.site.com/it but we don't know if that would impact search engine spiders (eg GoogleBot) in any way...
It would be better to do a Javascript redirect? Or an http 3xx redirect? If so, which of the 3xx redirect should we use?
Thank you
-
We've adopted the following solution:
we show the English homepage, but we determine the user's preferred language (from the Accept-Language header sent by the browser). If our site supports that language, we show a temporary balloon that highlights the related link to go to the localized homepage.
Thank you all for your hints and notes.
-
I would stay away from javascript redirects as it can be considered cloaking. Best thing to do is have a page for new visitors (those not having your cookie) and send them to a page that allows them to choose what language they want. You can then set a cookie so when they return it will automatically direct them to the right site.
By not doing any sneaky javascript redirects or IP redirects, you allow google the ability to crawl all the pages of your site and improve indexing, trust, etc etc... Also, I would go into Google webmaster tools and specify the country your /it pages are directed to. This will help in international search and trust from Google.
-
I've done a test with a simple ASP page with a Response.Redirect: <% Response.Redirect "test.htm" %>
This is what Fiddler has catched: HTTP/1.1 302 Object moved Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.1 Date: Thu, 05 May 2011 06:44:10 GMT X-Powered-By: ASP.NET Location: test.htm Content-Length: 121 Content-Type: text/html Cache-control: private <title>Object moved</title>
Object Moved
This object may be found <a href="">here</a>.
I don't think that 302 would be the best solution. As specified in the HTTP specs ( http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html ) wouldn't we prefer a 307 Temporary Redirect?
Thank you
-
You also asked about which 30x redirect to use. I'm also looking for this answer. We currently an ASP header redirect. I don't think this is best, but I'm not sure a 301 redirect can be used. I'd like to hear from others too.
This is what we have now:
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
-
They automatically redirect people in the uk who type in www.google.com to www.google.co.uk
But, this is different from changing language on a visitor. I'm not sure what google would do if I was in Italy and used my american laptop to visit google.com. I don't think they'd switch me to www.google.it, but maybe someone else has this answer.
Using the browser language settings has worked well for us.
-
You might want to look into what Google do themselves.
They automatically redirect people in the uk who type in www.google.com to www.google.co.uk
If it's good enough for google it's good enough for us. Just make sure you do not look like you are cloaking.
You need to give users the ability to change language when they are on the website though. As Vince mentioned just because a user is visiting the website from Italy it does not mean that they are Italian.
-
Hi Daminao,
I do a redirect based on browser language. I'd stay away from IP/location based redirects. You can have English vistors in Italian locations that would be lost on your pages.
hth,
Vince
-
Hi Damiano,
Matt explained very good in this video and basically he answers all your question.
If you have additional Q. please let me know
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Moved company 'Help Center' from Zendesk to Intercom, got lots of 404 errors. What now?
Howdy folks, excited to be part of the Moz community after lurking for years! I'm a few weeks into my new job (Digital Marketing at Rewind) and about 10 days ago the product team moved our Help Center from Zendesk to Intercom. Apparently the import went smoothly, but it's caused one problem I'm not really sure how to go about solving: https://help.rewind.io/hc/en-us/articles/*** is where all our articles used to sit https://help.rewind.io/*** is where all our articles now are So, for example, the following article has now moved as such: https://help.rewind.io/hc/en-us/articles/115001902152-Can-I-fast-forward-my-store-after-a-rewind- https://help.rewind.io/general-faqs-and-billing/frequently-asked-questions/can-i-fast-forward-my-store-after-a-rewind This has created a bunch of broken URLs in places like our Shopify/BigCommerce app listings, in our email drips, and in external resources etc. I've played whackamole cleaning many of these up, but these old URLs are still indexed by Google – we're up to 475 Crawl Errors in Search Console over the past week, all of which are 404s. I reached out to Intercom about this to see if they had something in place to help, but they just said my "best option is tracking down old links and setting up 301 redirects for those particular addressed". Browsing the Zendesk forms turned up some relevant-ish results, with the leading recommendation being to configure javascript redirects in the Zendesk document head (thread 1, thread 2, thread 3) of individual articles. I'm comfortable setting up 301 redirects on our website, but I'm in a bit over my head in trying to determine how I could do this with content that's hosted externally and sitting on a subdomain. I have access to our Zendesk admin, so I can go in and edit stuff there, but don't have experience with javascript redirects and have read that they might not be great for such a large scale redirection. Hopefully this is enough context for someone to provide guidance on how you think I should go about fixing things (or if there's even anything for me to do) but please let me know if there's more info I can provide. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | henrycabrown1 -
What's the best way to noindex pages but still keep backlinks equity?
Hello everyone, Maybe it is a stupid question, but I ask to the experts... What's the best way to noindex pages but still keep backlinks equity from those noindexed pages? For example, let's say I have many pages that look similar to a "main" page which I solely want to appear on Google, so I want to noindex all pages with the exception of that "main" page... but, what if I also want to transfer any possible link equity present on the noindexed pages to the main page? The only solution I have thought is to add a canonical tag pointing to the main page on those noindexed pages... but will that work or cause wreak havoc in some way?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau3 -
Why do people put xml sitemaps in subfolders? Why not just the root? What's the best solution?
Just read this: "The location of a Sitemap file determines the set of URLs that can be included in that Sitemap. A Sitemap file located at http://example.com/catalog/sitemap.xml can include any URLs starting with http://example.com/catalog/ but can not include URLs starting with http://example.com/images/." here: http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html#location Yet surely it's better to put the sitemaps at the root so you have:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart
(a) http://example.com/sitemap.xml
http://example.com/sitemap-chocolatecakes.xml
http://example.com/sitemap-spongecakes.xml
and so on... OR this kind of approach -
(b) http://example/com/sitemap.xml
http://example.com/sitemap/chocolatecakes.xml and
http://example.com/sitemap/spongecakes.xml I would tend towards (a) rather than (b) - which is the best option? Also, can I keep the structure the same for sitemaps that are subcategories of other sitemaps - for example - for a subcategory of http://example.com/sitemap-chocolatecakes.xml I might create http://example.com/sitemap-chocolatecakes-cherryicing.xml - or should I add a sub folder to turn it into http://example.com/sitemap-chocolatecakes/cherryicing.xml Look forward to reading your comments - Luke0 -
URL Rewriting Best Practices
Hey Moz! I’m getting ready to implement URL rewrites on my website to improve site structure/URL readability. More specifically I want to: Improve our website structure by removing redundant directories. Replace underscores with dashes and remove file extensions for our URLs. Please see my example below: Old structure: http://www.widgets.com/widgets/commercial-widgets/small_blue_widget.htm New structure: https://www.widgets.com/commercial-widgets/small-blue-widget I've read several URL rewriting guides online, all of which seem to provide similar but overall different methods to do this. I'm looking for what's considered best practices to implement these rewrites. From what I understand, the most common method is to implement rewrites in our .htaccess file using mod_rewrite (which will find the old URLs and rewrite them according to the rewrites I implement). One question I can't seem to find a definitive answer to is when I implement the rewrite to remove file extensions/replace underscores with dashes in our URLs, do the webpage file names need to be edited to the new format? From what I understand the webpage file names must remain the same for the rewrites in the .htaccess to work. However, our internal links (including canonical links) must be changed to the new URL format. Can anyone shed light on this? Also, I'm aware that implementing URL rewriting improperly could negatively affect our SERP rankings. If I redirect our old website directory structure to our new structure using this rewrite, are my bases covered in regards to having the proper 301 redirects in place to not affect our rankings negatively? Please offer any advice/reliable guides to handle this properly. Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheDude0 -
I'm a newb, built a website with Wix want to redirect it to a domain I own, but am reading that Wix is bad for this
Hi, I am building this site for my boss http://charlesfridmanpr.wix.com/real-estate and am still working on it. I'm getting close to the stage where I want to redirect it to the URL we want to use, but in reading these forums, it says that because all of subpages (?) have a # in them, they will not be read or indexed by google. I am very new to this, and while it may not look like it, the website has taken me quite a while to design. Is there a way to fix this? We want to appear high up for a non competitive keyword. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Charlesfridmanpr0 -
New Site (redesign) Launched Without 301 Redirects to New Pages - Too Late to Add Redirects?
We recently launched a redesign/redevelopment of a site but failed to put 301 redirects in place for the old URL's. It's been about 2 months. Is it too late to even bother worrying about it at this point? The site has seen a notable decrease in site traffic/visits, perhaps due to this issue. I assume that once the search engines get an error on a URL, it will remove it from displaying in search results after a period of time. I'm just not sure if they will try to re-crawl those old URLs at some point and if so, it may be worth it to have those 301 redirects in place. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BrandBuilder0 -
Does Google Read URL's if they include a # tag? Re: SEO Value of Clean Url's
An ECWID rep stated in regards to an inquiry about how the ECWID url's are not customizable, that "an important thing is that it doesn't matter what these URLs look like, because search engines don't read anything after that # in URLs. " Example http://www.runningboards4less.com/general-motors#!/Classic-Pro-Series-Extruded-2/p/28043025/category=6593891 Basically all of this: #!/Classic-Pro-Series-Extruded-2/p/28043025/category=6593891 That is a snippet out of a conversation where ECWID said that dirty urls don't matter beyond a hashtag... Is that true? I haven't found any rule that Google or other search engines (Google is really the most important) don't index, read, or place value on the part of the url after a # tag.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Atlanta-SMO0 -
When should you redirect a domain completely?
We moved a website over to a new domain name. We used 301 redirects to redirect all the pages individually (around 150 redirects). So my question is, when should we just kill the old site completely and just redirect (forward/point) the old domain over to the new one?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | co.mc0