Alternative languages redirecting

Question

Serving a page in English, EG:

https://www.example.com/en/make-games

Has the following meta tags:

<meta rel="alternate" href="https://www.example.com/fr/make-games" hreflang="fr" />
<meta rel="alternate" href="https://www.example.com/de/make-games" hreflang="de" />
<meta rel="alternate" href="https://www.example.com/zh/make-games" hreflang="zh" />

My issue is:

• When a new visitor visits the site, if no language tag is set (eg https://www.example.com/make-games it will make a guess as to which version of the site to server and 302 redirect them (eg to https://www.example.com/de/make-games)
• It will then save a cookie on their computer saying their language is de (saves to their account if logged in etc)
• Future requests where the cookie exists will automatically redirect to the de version

This concerns me from a crawling point of view, as if the crawler has the cookie set when crawling the site they will never be able to visit the alternative URLs, it will 302 redirect them back to the language they originally viewed.

What's the best way to handle this? One possible solution would be to have the alternative URLs along the lines of:

https://www.example.com/zh/make-games?forceLang=1

Which stops the auto redirect. Is this a reasonable solution?

Answer 1

Google recommends never to force a redirect and to follow this practice:

Assuming you have a website http://example.com, and two language versions, example.com/de/ and example.com/en/.

1. user comes on your site (http://example.com or into one of the language folders) for the first time,
2. you let user select his language, save it into cookie and after this redirect them into the according language folder (/de/ or /en/),
3. user comes on your site for the second time,
4. you check the cookie and redirect user into the corresponding language folder, saved in the cookie.

Bots don't work with cookies - this is the cause, why Google recommends to place at http://example.com no automatic or geo-based redirects, but only hreflangs. On this way you let the bot crawl the whole site. If you redirect automatically, you run the risk, Google will crawl, index and rank mostly english site version (because the bot comes from USA, with english-american language and US-IP-address).