Best practice to redirects based on visitors' detected language

[Damiano]

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/page2

The Italian pages are available under the /it/ level:
www.site.com/it   Italian homepage www.site.com/it/pagina1
www.site.com/it/pagina2

When 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

[Damiano]

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.

[CoolSEOnStuff]

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.

[Damiano]

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

[vheilman]

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

[vheilman]

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.

[A_Q]

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.

[vheilman]

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

[wissamdandan]

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

watch?v=7paVYBgH0Hw