I followed the recommendation of Google concerning multilingual website, I have:
www.example.com/fr
in frenchwww.example.com/en
in englishwww.example.com
automatically redirects (header) either towww.example.com/fr
orwww.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?
Accept-Language
header? How is Googlebot treated? It almost always crawls from the US and it doesn't send aAccept-Language
header.