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Our website www.websitename.com has three languages

E.g:

www.websitename.com/it

www.websitename.com/en

www.websitename.com/fr

by going to each of those links you will get all the remaining pages in the selected language.

You can also visit a page by manually typing the sub-folder at the front and automatically change the language : e.g www.websitename/en/test.php.

However by default apart from the main page e.g www.websitename.com/en the rest of the pages won't have the sub-folder appended to the URL so the links will be www.websitename/test1.php, www.websitename/test2.php etc.

Will Google or other search engine index the different of those or it will be only one version indexed because they are missing the language in the path?

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  • 1
    Are these pages all separate pages, or are you using cookies to translate a single page into 3 languages?
    – Max
    Feb 12, 2014 at 1:16
  • they are the same page (with different content/language using text files) I am using session vars.
    – Athanatos
    Feb 12, 2014 at 1:37

2 Answers 2

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If the pages are all the same and the language is dynamically changing Google wont be able to crawl the different languages.

When structuring a multi-lingual site, each language must be on separate URLs which Google can easily discover and crawl:

As Google explains:

Make sure each language version is easily discoverable

Keep the content for each language on separate URLs. Don’t use cookies to show translated versions of the page. Consider cross-linking each language version of a page. That way, a French user who lands on the German version of your page can get to the right language version with a single click.

Avoid automatic redirection based on the user’s perceived language. These redirections could prevent users (and search engines) from viewing all the versions of your site.

The recommended structure is using either sub domains, or sub folders, like you already have - But each language must have its seperate page within the sub folders.

More info can be found from Google here: Multi-regional and multilingual sites

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To follow on from @moobot's answer...

The correct way to handle what you're trying to achieve is to serve rel="alternate" hreflang="x" listing all the variations of the same page for different locations/languages in the <head> on a page. And also including the original version as well in the event there is not a version for a specific language/location so Google knows what to show by default.

You can learn more about this at Google.

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