After 301 redirection non-English keyword points to English language pages

[Optimal_Strategies]

We had multilingual website on .co.uk domain and somewhere in April, we've done 301 redirection from domain1.co.uk pages which were in Polish language to domain2.com/pl domain and now for some Polish keywords Google SERP sometimes shows English pages (.com) and sometimes polish pages (.com/pl). Previously co.uk/en had English content and that got redirected to .com. What could be the reason?

Thank you for all responses.

[Optimal_Strategies]

Hi,

So the situation looks like this

• website domain1.co.uk in not regional - it's in only for UK but had multiple languages

• polish language pages on domain1.co.uk website were redirected (301 redirect) to domain2.com  but with /pl "bit" so: domain1.co.uk/page1 > domain2.com/pl/page1 and domain1.co.uk/page2 > domain2.com/pl/page2

• when user in UK look for Polish keywords, for some the keywords, the result is correct (it shows domain2.com/pl/page2) and for some Polish keywords user in UK got served domain2.com/page2.  Please notice that in both cases is the same location and different polish keywords.

• pages on both sites was mostly "mirrored" which means article in Polish had English equivalent, so even when Polish user gets to English page, it's still relevant, thus increasing bounce rate as user don't necessary have to understand it.

Would you need more info to get clearer picture of the situation?

Thank you.

[effectdigital]

What you need to know is whether it was regional and multilingual at the same time. Many multilingual sites still do use regional redirects for their different site sections

[Optimal_Strategies]

Hi,

Sorry if I haven't been clear. Our website wasn't regional but multilingual and it was just for one country. The problem was related to users living in UK and wanted to receive Polish pages rather than English.

[effectdigital]

Absolutely not (sorry); I mean exempting the Googlebot user-agent from your redirects - which will involve re-writing the flexible redirect rules that handle the regional 301s. It has nothing to do with no-follows or any other 'normal' SEO stuff, you will need a developer

[Optimal_Strategies]

Thanks for an answer. By "exempt Googlebot from them" do you mean setting up nofollow attribute or something else?

[effectdigital]

If you have regional redirects in place (e.g: detect when users are from UK vs from PL, and then redirect incorrect queries to the right site) - then you may have failed to exempt Googlebot (user-agent) from those regional redirects

Google crawls from one data centre (location) at a time. If Google follows a link on a cached version of your old site to PL content and then regional redirects intercept Googlebot and 'incorrect' the crawl path, you can get stuff like this happening

Although regional redirects are often needed for users, it's best to exempt Googlebot from them so it doesn't get bounced around thus gaining an incomplete view of the site