Shall I automatically redirect international visitors from www.domain.com to e.g. www.domain.com/es? What is best SEO practice?

[lcourse]

We have chosen the one domain approach with our international site having different language versions in subdirectory of main domain:
www.domain.com/es
www.domain.com/it
etc.

What is SEO-wise best practice for implementing international index pages. I see following options:

1. entering  www.domain.com will display without redirection the index page in language of user (e.g based on IP or browser) in www.domain.com
   Example: www.booking.com
2. entering www.domain.com will always show English index page.
   Additionally one may display a message in the header if IP from other country with link to other language version.
   Example: www.apple.com
3. entering www.domain.com will always redirect automatically to country specific subdirectory based on IP
   Example: www.samsung.com

Any thoughts/suggestions on what may be best solution from a SEO perspective? For a user I believe options 1) & 3) are preferable.

[gfiorelli1]

The solution you describe it's correct, so you can go with it.

[lcourse]

good point. thanks Gianluca.

But in this particular case crawling would not be an issue since non-English language versions are in subdirectories which are accessable via country dropdown. US google spider seeing the EN version in the main domain is exactly as desired. So if crawling is not an issue, do you still see a problem with option 3). To address your point, I  would also enforce that if someone clicks via country dropdown to English version, that this person would not be redirected again.

What do you think?

In case of websites following an international one domain strategy such as booking.com, redirecting to subdirectory may be most convenient for vast majority of users, since the name of the main domain is promoted to users in different languages.

[gfiorelli1]

Option 1 must be discarded.

Option 2, which is also what Amazon does, is the best one IMHO, even though should be also present a country selector html page, so that Googlebot can discover it and crawl it.

Option 3 is a no no, because you are pretending that someone is visiting your site just in his language, which may be not true. More over, this is also discouraged by Google for that same reason, and because googlebot IP is american... it would end always seeing the version assigned to US IPs.

[farbeseo]

Subdirectories can work very well. Those subdirectories can benefit from link juice above them. I would also consider different sitemaps for the different languages. Again, I like your third option from a user experience standpoint. Given the search engine's emphasis on that coupled with improved click through rates, you should do well as long as the content end of things is good.

[lcourse]

Thanks.We believe in our case language versions in subdirectry over country specific TLDs is the better choice. My doubt is really just about how to best deal with international visits to www.domain.com.

[farbeseo]

There's a lot of good info out there on this subject. The ideal for ranking in a specific country would be to have domain.es with a hosting provider in Spain that has a local Spain billing address. Aside from that, I personally like option 3 in your list but provide links to other languages in case the user is on a VPN that confounds geolocation.