302 Redirect based on Language Detection

[bjs2010]

Hi,

Our online application, magento e-commerce, has a script that detects browser language and does a 302 redirection to the language of choice ... www.mydomain.com/en/ or www.mydomain.com/es/

What's the SEO angle on this? Should I be concerned?

thanks,

Ben

[CleverPhD]

Yes - forget the 302, I get nothing but headaches from them.  I would not use a 301 either as a permanent redirect would not be accurate in how you are relating one page to the other.   I think you need to consider if this needs to be automatic or not (regardless of how you forward people).  I would suggest using a Javascript based approach - here are the details on why.

Here is an article from Bill Hunt http://searchengineland.com/understanding-the-seo-challenges-of-language-detection-47524 he mentions how you can use an automatic IP address or a browser language based approach to send people to the proper page.  There is a problem with this for the spiders.

"Both of these methods are problematic for search engines, because spiders often crawl from a specific location and don’t signal language preference in their server request. For example, if Googlebot, crawling from Mountain View in California, requested a German language page on a site using IP detection the web server would detect an request from a IP in the U.S. and the crawler would be routed to the U.S. version and potentially never see the German language version. The same scenario on a site with browser detection would not detect any language preference and thus route the spider to the default version of the site which is typically English for US companies and the local language version for many country installations of scripts and web servers."

Matt Cutts mentions this in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7paVYBgH0Hw for using IP as (in 2011) Google was only crawling from US IPs.

Bill Hunt in his article mentions a solution, don't redirect the spiders "The easiest search workaround for either of these detection methods is to simply determine if the requester is a search engine and exempt them from any redirection, giving them the page they want. Note I did not say redirect them or any other action that could be misconstrued by conspiracy theorists as cloaking but simply let the spider have the page it requested. This will ensure spiders can index your local language content."

If that gives you concern about to handle the automatic redirect - see the bottom of http://moz.com/community/q/what-countries-does-google-crawl-from-is-it-only-us-or-do-they-crawl-from-europe-and-asia-etc Hannah Smith from Distilled suggests using a Javascript overlay or some other "chooser page" to direct them to it.  If you link up everything correctly, Google can crawl both versions of the site, but only the user is shown something dynamic to direct them where they want to go.   This also ensures that if there are any errors in either the IP address shown or the default language in the browser, you have a way to fail gracefully and allow the user to select where they want to go on the site.

Good luck!

[jesse-landry]

302s don't pass link juice. 301s do. Not sure how that fact works with what you're doing... Sounds tricky.