I have a domain with different markets/languages on different URL paths, like example.com/fr
for France and example.com/se
for Sweden. This way we gets all our pages indexed for each language - great! But we also have domain.com without suffix which will lead to the site for England, and we cannot change this easily.
We want to force our users to choose language and are doing so, backend, that checks for a cookie. Without this cookie they will be redirected to example.com/choosecountry
. This, of course, is not good for SEO for the English version of the page. To Google - all pages will look like the language chooser.
I know it would be best to have example.com/en
or so, but it's not possible at the moment. So I'm thinking about a JavaScript redirect instead. Read the cookie with JS cookie, and if it's not there, do a window.locaton.href. But nowadays it seems as the Google bots actually is reading JavaScript files, and their latest Ajax recommendations (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.se/2015/10/deprecating-our-ajax-crawling-scheme.html) says it will follow links as a normal browser does.
So my question is - would the bots ignore the pages because it redirects, or would they still be included in the index? At this moment it would not be possible to index the site at all, because the server does not give any HTML data other than the language chooser. To check the user agent and not redirect Google bots is not an option - We would probably get punished for that?
example.com/fr
?