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I followed the recommendation of Google concerning multilingual website, I have:

  • www.example.com/fr in french
  • www.example.com/en in english
  • www.example.com automatically redirects (header) either to www.example.com/fr or www.example.com/en.

In my sitemap.xml, I have not mentionned www.example.com but instead the two subdirectories, still following Google on sitemap policy: 

<url>
  <loc>http://www.example.com/fr/</loc>
  <xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="http://www.example.com/en/"/>
  <xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr" href="http://www.example.com/fr/"/>
  <changefreq>daily</changefreq>
 <priority>1.00</priority>
</url>
<url>
  <loc>http://www.example.com/en/</loc>
  <xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr" href="http://www.example.com/fr/"/>
  <xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="http://www.example.com/en/"/>
  <changefreq>daily</changefreq>
  <priority>1.00</priority>
</url>

Problem is that in Google, the main results is www.example.com. For many websites, Google displays for the first results .com/fr or .com/en depending our location but not juste .com.

I was thinking of using Webmaster Tools and try remove www.example.com but I'm not sure since www.example.com is not really a sitelink and I'm afraid it will juste remove my site from Google. Do I miss something? Or maybe I should just wait?

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    How are you determining which language to redirect towards? Is it based on geographic IP address or Accept-Language header? How is Googlebot treated? It almost always crawls from the US and it doesn't send a Accept-Language header. – Stephen Ostermiller♦ Jan 20 '14 at 11:08
  • 2
    Did you used to have on of the languages hosted in the root folder? If so, how long ago was that? – Stephen Ostermiller♦ Jan 20 '14 at 11:09
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    Very good points : If the user doesn't browse .ocm/fr or .com/en but just .com, I redirect using the ip adress and making a call to an online api. Once I get the answer, I redirect to /fr (if france) or /en else. Now, 2 months ago, I had only one url : ".com" and language of the this page was also found using ip to set a session variable. At this time, my website was indexed in english (i guess because googlebot crawl from us). But now (and for 2 months now), i have different urls for the two languages. – Mansur Khan Jan 20 '14 at 13:24
3

You need to include the "/" URL in your Sitemap file and specify it as the hreflang "x-default". That way, Google will know that this is a part of your set of pages, and will be able to handle it appropriately. Note that hreflang is a signal, and not a directive for Google, so it might be that the "/" URL still occasionally shows up.

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Your general setup sounds fine. A few things to check:

  • When you do your geo-IP redirects, ensure that they are the "301 permanent" variety. If you are using 302 temporary redirects, Google will be hesitant to change the URLs
  • Test Googlebot specifically.

I tend to use a command line program like curl to test these items. Make sure the information you get back looks similar to the following:

curl --head --user-agent 'Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)' http://example.com/
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Location: http://example.com/en/

If you need to make any additional changes, it may take Googlebot a week to realize the home page has moved and a month or more to get to all the pages on the site.

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  • Ok. For now, it's redirected using a header location request, so it's 302 by default. I can set it to be 301. What do you mean by "test googlebot specifically" ? You mean, in my php code, to detect if it's googlebot and do specific actions in that case, or is the action in robots.txt ? – Mansur Khan Jan 20 '14 at 21:34
  • Use a Googlebot user agent when contacting the server. That is why I use the --user-agent flag with curl. – Stephen Ostermiller♦ Jan 20 '14 at 21:41
  • Curl is sending me 406 answer : "LiteSpeed technology is not responsible for administration and contents of this web site!" – Mansur Khan Jan 21 '14 at 15:58
  • 406 is a very unusual response code. It would be worth getting to the bottom of what is generating it and why. stackoverflow.com/questions/14251851/… – Stephen Ostermiller♦ Jan 21 '14 at 16:18
  • Actually, "curl --head example.com" gives 406 code. your request, gives : curl: (6) Could not resolve host: (compatible; curl: (6) Could not resolve host: Googlebot curl: (1) Protocol +http not supported or disabled in libcurl HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently Date: Tue, 21 Jan 2014 16:28:12 GMT Server: LiteSpeed Connection: close X-Powered-By: PHP/5.3.23 Set-Cookie: PHPSESSID=6d45be72d9847aaa8112d2d51efcec5c; path=/ Expires: Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMT Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-che Pragma: no-cache Location: /fr/ Content-Type: text/html – Mansur Khan Jan 21 '14 at 16:29

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