I have a website that's currently entirely English. I'm adding support for multiple languages, and would like them all indexed (so I can't serve different languages at the same URL).
I opted to use / to redirect to /en-GB/ (or the best language I can, based on browser headers and the languages/cultures I have). I'm avoiding the use of sessions (for performance and scaling), so all links in the site are relative (as if the culture name is a folder).
This all works great, but I'm curious about how Google will treat the redirect at the homepage, bearing in mind:
- Many links will go to /
- Google may be redirected to a different version of the site from the root / depending on headers it passes
- Many people will linked directly to their preferred versions of the site
- Some languages (en-US and en-GB) will be mostly the same, except for subtle differences and date formats (penalties for duplicate content?)