Question

I’m planning on building a new multilingual site and am thinking about its impact on SEO.

When a user goes to the domain for the first time, his language setting is detected and based on that, the language is set, he gets redirected to the appropriate lang version of the website and is cookied. If, during a different session, that user surfs to the domain, the cookie is detected and the user is redirected to the appropriate country/language page. At the same time, the user is able to manually change the set language (and thus the cookie gets changed too).

First off, if I do a redirect on the homepage (if the user isn’t cookied), will Google penalize me for doing this?

Second, if I store my languages in folders like www.mydomain.com/en-us/page.html and www.mydomain.com/cs-cz/page.html, will Google crawl through the entire thing or just the default language (meaning, if I’m unable to detect the language or don’t have my site in that language, I select English)?

Thanks in advance,
Ondrej

Answer 1

If you have multi-lingual content you should follow Google’s new multi-lingual guidelines. Basically, you use subdomains for the different translations:

To explain how it works, let’s look at some example URLs:
http://www.example.com/ – contains the general homepage of a website, in Spanish
http://es-es.example.com/ – is the version for users in Spain, in Spanish
http://es-mx.example.com/ – is the version for users in Mexico, in Spanish
http://en.example.com/ – is the generic English language version
On all of these pages, we could use the following markup to specify language and optionally the region:

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="es" href="http://www.example.com/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="es-ES" href="http://es-es.example.com/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="es-MX" href="http://es-mx.example.com/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="http://en.example.com/" />

If you specify a regional subtag, we’ll assume that you want to target that region.
Keep in mind that all of these annotations are to be used on a per-URL basis. You should take care to use the specific URL, not the homepage, for both of these link elements.