Question

I have a multilingual site with the same content in different languages with descriptive seo urls incorporating the title of each pages article. To switch between said languages of translated articles I have an action which looks up the translated title using the previous language and redirects to it. This all works fine except I noticed, despite there being no view, google has indexed said redirect urls.

Is this bad practice? I don't want to 301 redirect as it seems having links on every page to 301 redirects is a really bad idea. Do I somehow include a meta tag or is there some other approach?

The reason I currently have this is I want each article page to link to all of its translations using flags at the top of each page. The more I think about it I should just generate the direct url as this itself may have seo benefits. The reason I didn't go down this path originally was page rendering speed. I'd have to look up multiple articles solely for their url slug and expire caches of all languages upon any title change (it's a wiki style user generated content). Also, in some cases a translation wouldn't exist in which case I would need to link instead, say, to the category of article with a flash message.

So thinking through this while writing maybe this seems the preferable if more difficult to implement solution?

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Solution

Hey Mark, from a search engine perspective you definitely don't want to rely on redirects everywhere, if for nothing other than performance. Search engines allocate a certain amount of bandwidth to each site based on ranking, if you're redirecting every page, you're eating up more of that bandwidth than you need to, and potentially not getting as much content crawled as you could otherwise.

Your second solution of generating the localized URLs and sticking them at the top of the page is the best option for search engines. That will give a unique URL for each page, and will provide a direct link to each page that Google and Bing (e.g. Yahoo) can follow and index.

I provided a set of best practices for SEO & Localized sites on another stackoverflow Q&A, here's a link, I think you'll find it valuable too: Internationalization and Search Engine Optimization

Good luck!

OTHER TIPS

I have an app that I'm building that supports ten languages: English, simplified and traditional Chinese, French, Spanish, Russian, Japanese, German, and Hindi.

I tried a number of things but what I ended up doing was making :en default and then switching by where the request was coming from and then when uses signup they can set a default language. So if it was coming from mainland China I use :scn, and if it comes from Hong Kong I use :tcn traditional Chinese/simplified Chinese.

This way the application maintains a state of a language and there is no redirection.

I think any redirection is going to be troublesome so I wouldn't do that. Also, I am working on a dynamic site map that will list all of the links to google, which will have 10 different translations per 'page'.

I haven't deployed my application yet so I cannot check the Chinese search engines etc... to see if they are indexing my content.

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