let's assume we have a domain example.com
that contains content for two languages (e.g. German and English).
The site itself is structured by folders, so the URLs for the language versions are:
example.com/de/
-> German Pageexample.com/en/
-> English Page
If someone now enters example.com
in the browser I do not want to show a "select language page" that lets the user choose the language but an automatic detection of the browser language to redirect (301) to /de/ for German users and to /en/ for all others.
That is nothing special so far.
But I fear that search engines like Google will have problems indexing the url example.com
. So instead of doing the automatic redirect (302) on that page, what about the following idea:
example.com
does a 301 to example.com/en/
in any case and on the page example.com/en/
the language of the user is then detected. If the language is "German", another redirect (301) to example.com/de/
is made. Otherwise, nothing is done. One could even think about checking the referrer on example.com/en/
if it comes from example.com
and only in that case, probe for the German language of the user. The advantage of that would be that a German user could actively switch to example.com/en/
without triggering another redirect back to the German version.
Is such as method for redirecting in a multi language page a good idea in regards to SEO terms?