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I've been reading a lot about it but it's still really hard to make up my mind.

My understand is that if your website provide a link to the other language, this should not be an issue for google as long as your links are clear and clean, google will be able to make his way through it.

The website was orginaly in french and I added the english version and I'm just worry that english speaker will just leave if the site is not in the correct language, for the home page I just wanted to get the value from the browser and redirect it to /fr/ or /en/ for the first page. (using php this will be very easy)

Also the website has good rank on the french side and the english has been online for 2 weeks and only get few visit a day, is that because all the back link refer to /fr/ and google is cleaver enough to decide that they are 2 differantes website and the back link will have to point to /en/ to increase the ranking value? Or will take few more weeks for the website to grow?

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  • Take a look at this question: webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/403/… It has some of google's recommendation on creating multi lingual content.
    – Saif Bechan
    Commented Nov 14, 2011 at 16:44
  • I removed the the request to review your site has it would make this question too localized as website reviews aren't considered the type of question appropriate for this site.
    – John Conde ♦
    Commented Nov 14, 2011 at 22:39

1 Answer 1

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You shouldn't set the language using the browser language, that's not really reliable. For example I'm using firefox in english but I'm french and most of the pages that I visit are written in French.

Anyway, there is a line in the header of the http protocol called Accept-Language.This field depends on the browser that you use and is calculated from the way you navigate from sites to sites.

you can use this information to set the default language of your site (i.e. the user visits the domain for the first time).

Here's a link where you can find a script that treats this field and gives you an array with an entry for each language found in it :

Parse Accept-Language to detect a user's language

You'll find more information about this Accept-Language field there.

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  • Never heard about this one before but it's really good idea, checked out your code, nice and simple, I will re-use it.
    – Arnaud
    Commented Nov 15, 2011 at 9:49
  • What you mean by "shouldn't set the language using the browser language"? Because you then describe how to set the language based on the browser setting...
    – DisgruntledGoat
    Commented Jan 4, 2012 at 22:53
  • @DisgruntledGoat by browser language i mean the language that you define on installation. by browser settings I mean the accept-language property that the browser insert into http headers calculated from the way you navigate through pages to pages. If you are curious : w3.org/International/questions/qa-accept-lang-locales
    – vdegenne
    Commented Jan 5, 2012 at 9:02

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