Indexing multilanguage site on search engines

Question

I have a multilanguage website which is structured in the following way:

index

• home
• pageA
• pageB
• pageC
• etc

Each page has it's own language file which is loaded dynamically with an select option. When an option is select, also the meta tags (keywords, description, etc.) are loaded dynamically from external files in the index.php file.

What's the best practice to make it clear to the search engines that there are other languages than the default language? Otherwise, does the search engines see the other language files? If yes, how would they see the other files?

Maybe it's not the best way from the seo point, but maintenance would be very easy, because the contents are separated from the pages.

Thanks in advance for any hints.

Answer 1

Google has published a large amount of advice that helps them find and associate the appropriate language versions of sites and pages. You would effectively need to ensure every language version of the page is accessible directly by it's own URL, then use HTML mark-up in your HEAD, as per the example from Google:

Update the HTML of each URL in the set by adding a set of rel="alternate" hreflang="x" link elements. For the default page that doesn’t target any specific language or locale, add rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default":

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="http://www.example.com/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-gb" href="http://en-gb.example.com/page.html" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-us" href="http://en-us.example.com/page.html" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="http://en.example.com/page.html" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="de" href="http://de.example.com/seite.html" />

Answer 2

Modern search engines are very smart and can crawl dynamic elements of websites. They automate the processes like button click, selection of an option from select menu etc. So, they will crawl all your language files by default you don't have to do anything.