I am in the process of translating a set of websites to multiple languages. Would there be any negative implications if I were to serve each different language from identical URLs?
I fully intend to fully implement translated URLs, hreflang meta tags, etc. But before I do that (and start risking making a mistake where Google might start seeing duplicate content) I'd like to be able to implement the translations to make sure everything "works" OK.
But will Google see that as "cloaking" or something else "black hat" because I'm serving different content from the same URL?
Just to be clear, the language would be selected by a POST form, set a session variable for the user, and then use that session variable for the rest of the session.
Edit I'm aware of the best practices for multilingual sites. I just don't want to implement them all at this time. It's a large project, so I'll be doing it in phases. I mostly want to know if I could be penalized by Google in any way.
Also, the websites sniff the users Browser language, and if we have that translation will serve it to them seamlessly. If we don't have that language, they'll get the English default.