HTTP offers Content Negotiation (by reacting on the Accept-Language request header) to deliver translated representations of a resource under one URI. In January 2015 Google finally implemented this feature and calls it "Locale-aware crawling by Googlebot".
Could anybody get different representations under one URI successfully into the index?
I'm trying this for http://www.mixcloud-downloader.com/ which can additionally to its default English representation serve a German representation. This site is since one month in Google's index. Additionally to the Vary: accept-language
response header, I also added an indication which languages are supported:
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="http://www.mixcloud-downloader.com/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="de" href="http://www.mixcloud-downloader.com/" />
If I would search for something from the German representation which is unique in the internet (e.g. "Mixcloud Internetadresse"
with quotes) google.de doesn't find it.
What do I have to do, to make Google successfully aware of a translated representation under one URI?
Edit: I noticed that my application was sending a bogus Content-Language
header, which might have confused Google. I fixed that on 2017-01-19. Previously it did respond with e.g. a zh-CN header and English content (if the client requested zh-CN).
"Mixcloud Internetadresse"
. That was fast.