Homepage indexation issue

[buiserik]

Hello all,

I've been scratching my head about this one for a while now... Let me explain the situation.

I'm working on a multi-lingual website. Visitors are redirected (301) when they visit the homepage to the correct domain.com/en/default.html, domain.com/nl/default.html, domain.com/fr/default.html or domain.com/de/default.html based on browser language. I have doubts about the impact on the ability for Google to index the website because of that, but that's a problem for another day.

The problem I'm having right now, is that domain.com/nl/default.html, domain.com/de/default.html and domain.com/fr/default.html are all indexed. When I search for the URL in Google I get the correct page on number one so I'm pretty sure those are indexed correctly. When I search for domain/en/default.html though, the homepage appears without /en/default.html extension. Does this mean Google assumes the domain.com page is the same as domain.com/en/default.html even though the redirect that's in place?

Would be great if someone could shed some light on this.

Thanks in advance!

[RyanPurkey]

Questions

1. This type of behavior is considered a temporary redirect. Maybe it's better to think of the name as a conditional redirect. In which case, "Oh, your browser is in FR, with that condition let's send you here..."  The 301 is supposed to be used as an unconditional redirect, telling crawlers that you're trying to migrate from URL A to B permanently, so get rid of URL A.
2. Not necessarily. VS a 301, yes. but scrapability is mostly down to linking and sitemaps.
3. Yup.
4. Nope. You'd want to interlink directly to the other languages anyways though in case the 302 doesn't work for whatever reasons. Then the link is passing authority and the user has an option available to them if they'd like to get there on their own.
5. Right. It'd be best to interlink with hreflang on each as you never know for certain how someone arrives at those pages.  Best to give them and crawlers the guidance to where the other translations reside.

You're welcome! Hopefully that clears it all up for you.

[buiserik]

Thanks a lot for your answer. The follow up question above also continues on your answer. Would be great to hear your thoughts.

[buiserik]

Thanks a lot for this one. I have never worked on these kinds of automatic redirects so I thought to stay away from them till I got the indexation issue fixed. But I understand from your answer the two might be related.

Just to clarify and make sure I'm doing the right thing.

The situation at the moment: domain.com -> browser language = EN -> 301 redirect to domain.com/en/default.htm
domain.com -> browser language = NL -> 301 redirect to domain.com/nl/default.htm
domain.com -> browser language = DE -> 301 redirect to domain.com/de/default.htm
domain.com -> browser language = FR -> 301 redirect to domain.com/fr/default.htm

In this situation using the  query "site:domain.com", the results include the /de/, /nl/, /fr/ and domain.com, but excludes /en/.

You advise to change this in to: domain.com -> browser language = EN -> 302 redirect to domain.com/en/default.htm
domain.com -> browser language = NL -> 302 redirect to domain.com/nl/default.htm
domain.com -> browser language = DE -> 302 redirect to domain.com/de/default.htm
domain.com -> browser language = FR -> 302 redirect to domain.com/fr/default.htm

I need to include a hreflang=x-default on the domain.com page.

A few question that pop-up in my mind:
I always thought a 302 was only used for temporarily redirects?
Does using a 302 improves the scrapability of the website?
Would it possibily result in /en/default.htm be indexed again?
Does a 302 pass along authority?
I assume I need to implement href lang on the /LANGUAGE/default.htm pages as well right?

Thanks a lot!

[Ray-pp]

As others have mentioned, using a 301 redirect in this situation is not the most efficient use case, especially if you want all versions of your site to be indexed and available to users.

For displaying regional content (e.g. you have the same content, but it is translated to a specific language on different page versions) you would want to use hreflang to tell Google that you have multiple versions and the regions they satisfy. This will allow Google to serve up the regional specific content to users in international Google search engines and Google will index/know which versions are appropriate.

Reference link: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077

Additional reference: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en#2

[RyanPurkey]

If you can, get that 301 redirection issue solved first as it's definitely not the type of one you want to use for this behavior. Google specifically recommends, "... to automatically serve the appropriate HTML content to your users depending on their location and language settings. You will either do that by using server-side 302 redirects or by dynamically serving the right HTML content." From here: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2014/05/creating-right-homepage-for-your.html. They go further into the hreflang tags here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en.

After getting the 301 cleaned up, for finding indexed pages it's better to use the "site:" search based operator in Google, Google Webmaster Tools, and Analytics.  But really, get that 301 changed.  Cheers!

[MonicaOConnor]

If I understand your post correctly, domain.com/de/default.html has a 301 redirect to correctly direct traffic to the appropriate home page for their language?

If that is what you are saying than the chances are the the domain.com/de/default.html  is no longer being indexed because of the 301 redirect. That redirect tells the engines that the page has moved, so they stop crawling it. I am not an expert on redirecting home pages, but maybe look into Ref lang tags and REL canonical tags in place of the 301 redirect.