301 or 302?

redirection issue

[tpkl]

my website delivers different content based on browser language.

for example - if browser language is 'en-us' it will deliver the index page example<us>.html, if it is 'it' then index page example<it>.html will be delivered.

my question is, do i need to set up 301 for each of these redirects? or should it be 302 redirects?

what will be the issues with search engines if i do a 301/302?

any help will be greatly appreciated.

thanks in advance.

[jdMorgan]

You might want to look into Apache content-negotiation, which is a built-in way to deliver content based on browser preference settings and capability.

No redirect is required. Rather, an internal URL-to-filename rewrite is used.

At a higher level, browser settings can be unreliable. For example, an employee in a multi-lingual company with centrally-administrated brower configuration may be using a browser set to a language he/she doesn't speak fluently. Therefore, you can't really trust the browser settings, except perhaps for a default language selection.

A better usability solution is to provide on-page language selection, for example, with clickable national flags which set a language-preference cookie.

If you already have GeoIP services available on your server, a good method might be:

If language cookie is present in the request, use the language selection stored in the cookie.
If GeoIP can locate the requesting IP address, use IP-based country/language selection.
If neither of the above are available, default to browser language preference.

The language-selection flags should always be available on multi-lingual sites, in case the GeoIP and/or current language cookie are wrong (e.g. in case a different-language user shares the same log-in account).

Jim