Homepage indexation issue
-
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!
-
Questions
- 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.
- Not necessarily. VS a 301, yes. but scrapability is mostly down to linking and sitemaps.
- Yup.
- 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.
- 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.
-
Thanks a lot for your answer. The follow up question above also continues on your answer. Would be great to hear your thoughts.
-
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.htmIn 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.htmI 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!
-
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
-
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!
-
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.
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
-
Internal Links issue in webmaster
we implemented our website on the basis of WordPress, then we migrate our website to PHP (YII Framework). after a while, we found out an issue around internal links which they were increasing severely. when we check our landing pages in webmaster (for example Price list), in contains 300 internal links but the reality is that there are no href tags on this page. it seems that webmaster calculate most of our links with the links of a single page and show them to us. is it natural or a mis configuration has been happened? Yh1NzPl
Technical SEO | | jacelyn_wiren0 -
Homepage not indexed
Hi, I have a problem with my website. From my PC, when I search for site:nobelcom.com the homepage of the website doesn't appear, but on other PCs (different IPs) it is ok.
Technical SEO | | Silviu
Also any keywords that usually responded with homepage, now responds with other page. Does anyone know way this is happening. It happen before the Penguin update, and after a fetch like google and send to index, I had the homepage back on serps0 -
Why is Google not indexing my site?
I'm a bit confused as to why my site just isn't indexing on Google. Even if I type in my brand name, my social channels rank and there's no evidence of my website. I've followed all of the advice I've read and gone into webmaster tools and got the Wordpress yoast plug-in but nothing seems to be making a difference!One thing I've noticed, in Google Webmaster Tools it says "Couldn’t communicate with the DNS server." in site errors. I've called GoDaddy and they said that everything is fine. A bit frustrating. Trying to work out what my next steps should be but feeling a bit lost to be honest! Any help GREATLY appreciated!
Technical SEO | | j1066s0 -
Do Sitespect links get indexed?
I put a link on one of my websites using sitespect because the next release is not for a few weeks. The reason for the link is to pass domain authority (SEO Juice) to the linked site. In my next release I will add the link in the actual code, but am hoping that from now till then google will crawl and index this link. So the question is, will google crawl and index links adding to webpages via sitespect? Here is the code: | * [http://www.](<a class=)yourdomain.com" class="" >YourDomain |
Technical SEO | | AlyssaN
| | | Link to Sitespect: http://www.sitespect.com/0 -
How to determine which pages are not indexed
Is there a way to determine which pages of a website are not being indexed by the search engines? I know Google Webmasters has a sitemap area where it tells you how many urls have been submitted and how many are indexed out of those submitted. However, it doesn't necessarily show which urls aren't being indexed.
Technical SEO | | priceseo1 -
Crawling issues in google
Hi everyone, I think i have crawling issues with one of my sites. It has vanished form Google rankings it used to rank for all services i offered now it doesn't anymore ever since September 29th. I have resubmitted to Google 2 times and they came back with the same answer: " We reviewed your site and found no manual actions by the web spam team that might affect your site's ranking in Google. There's no need to file a reconsideration request for your site, because any ranking issues you may be experiencing are not related to a manual action taken by the webspam team. Of course, there may be other issues with your site that affect your site's ranking. Google's computers determine the order of our search results using a series of formulas known as algorithms. We make hundreds of changes to our search algorithms each year, and we employ more than 200 different signals when ranking pages. As our algorithms change and as the web (including your site) changes, some fluctuation in ranking can happen as we make updates to present the best results to our users. If you've experienced a change in ranking which you suspect may be more than a simple algorithm change, there are other things you may want to investigate as possible causes, such as a major change to your site's content, content management system, or server architecture. For example, a site may not rank well if your server stops serving pages to Googlebot, or if you've changed the URLs for a large portion of your site's pages. This article has a list of other potential reasons your site may not be doing well in search. " How i detected that it may be a crawling issue is that 2 weeks ago i changed metas - metas are very slow in getting updated and for some of my pages never did update Do you know any good tools to check for bad code that could slow down the crawling. I really don't know where to look other than issues for crawling. I validated the website with w3c validator and ran xenu and cleaned these up but my website is still down. Any ideas are appreciated.
Technical SEO | | CMTM0 -
Bing and Yahoo Indexing
I have a young site (6 most) that is almost completely indexed by Google but Bing and Yahoo will only index a few pages. Does anyone have any tips for getting more pages indexed in Bing and Yahoo. The site is registered with Bing Webmaster tools and has a valid XML sitemmap.
Technical SEO | | waynekolenchuk0 -
Getting images indexed in the SERPS
Good Afternoon form 13 degrees C totally Sunny Wetherby UK 🙂 Am i right in thinking that the only way to get images appearing like this in your serps: http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/cc53/zymurgy_bucket/innovia-merchant-immages-serpscopy.jpg is to be hooked up to Google Merchant? Which kind of means if the sight your working on has no images then this type of enhancement is out of bounds? Thanks in advance, David
Technical SEO | | Nightwing0