Multilingual website - Url problem (sitemap)

[Anycoin]

At this moment our website both uses the language in the url like "en" and localizes the url itself ("books" in english and "boeken" in dutch). Because of the history of making our website multilingual we have a system that takes the browser language for the localization if the url doesn't contain a language like "en".

This means:

• www.test.com/books = browser language
• www.test.com/en/books = english language
• www.test.com/boeken = browser language
• www.test.com/nl/boeken = dutch language

Now for the sitemap this makes it a little troublesome for me because which hreflang is used for which url?

1) The first thing I thought of was using x-default for all urls that get the language of the browser.

 <code><url><loc>http://www.test.com/books</loc></url></code> 

But as you can see we now got 2 times x-default.

2) Another solution I thought of was just use the localization of the url to determine the language like:

 <code><url><loc>http://www.test.com/books</loc></url></code> 

But now we got 2 of each language for the same page.

3) The last solution I thought of was removing links without a language in the url (except for the homepage, which will still have an x-default) like:

 <code><url><loc>http://www.test.comen/books</loc></url></code> 

But for this solution I need to put 301's at pages that are "deleted" and also need to change the system to 301 to the right page. Although the last point isn't really a problem I'm kind of worried that I will lose some of the "seo points" with a 301. (When we changed our domain in the past we had a bad experience with the 301 of our old domain)

What do you think would be the best solution for SEO? Or do you have any other suggestions or solutions I haven't thought of.

[katemorris]

The best way to go about this is to keep the URLs with the language in the structure. Redirect (301) the ones that don't have it to the ones that do.

However, it sounds like that causes a problem. If the above isn't a possibility, use a canonical from the non-language URL to the one with it. Then do your HREFLANG in sitemaps, and only use the URLs with the language tag in the sitemaps. You can also do the coding on the page, just make sure the HREFLANG tags are not on the non-language pages.

• Example URL: http://www.test.com/boeken would have a canonical tag that points to http://www.test.com/nl/boeken
• Only http://www.test.com/nl/boeken is listed in the sitemaps
• OR Only http://www.test.com/nl/boeken has HREFLANG tags. http://www.test.com/boeken would only have the canonical.

That should solve your problem.

[RyanPurkey]

From their support page (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en) when you're combining region plus language you'll want to do this:

For example, you may have specific URLs for English speakers in Ireland (en-ie), Canada (en-ca), and Australia (en-au), but want all other English speakers to see your generic English (en) page, and everyone else to see the homepage. In this case you should specify the generic English-language (en) page for searchers in, say, the UK. You can annotate this cluster of pages using a Sitemap file or using HTML link tags like this:

That way you can even have a situation like nl-en or vice versa. I'd use 302s for redirecting based on conditional things like browser settings.  Cheers!