As I understand correct a canonical URL should point to the original URL of the website. Our website provides different languages that can be switched with an URL parameter, instantly.
Our website is well translated and offers the same content in a different language and once the language parameter is not provided it will determine the language of the browser and show the right language without redirecting to add the language parameter.
There are three ways I could put the canonical URL now and I'm not sure what I should pick:
Always using
https://example.org/?Lang=xx-XX
with the language parameter that is used or the determined language when no language parameter is set.Always using
https://example.org/
, assuming language does not matter as the content is the same in meaning. I guess this is wrong, because a crawler would be English, so it would never crawl other languages, since other languages have the same original URL, it wouldn't?Using
https://example.org/?Lang=xx-XX
when the language parameter is provided, otherwise using onlyhttps://example.org/
, assuming when the language is not provided the original link shouldn't contain the language, too. So it will be determined when following the canonical URL.
Currently, we are going with variant one. This, however, ended up showing us on Google with the language parameter. When the exact text matches this is reasonable. But when I search for our name I rather want to see the URL without language parameter.
What should I do?