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I'm offering almost all my pages in English
and German. The files are .html.en and .html.de,
and if someone requests the .html version, apache
will deliver whatever language it sees fit. At
the bottom of the page there's an explicit link
to the other language, so that someone being served the English version when requesting .html can still switch to German if he wants.
Sadly, Googlebot refuses to follow the .html.de link at the bottom of my page and instead only indexes the English version. Other search engines will handle this correctly. Several mails to Google have not been answered apart from the automated "we do read all the mail" response.
Any insights? How can I make sure that German- speaking Google users will find my German pages?
Bye
Frederik
To solve you problem, this is what I recommend:
1. Break the German pages out of the site and restore the English part to normal flat html pages.
2. Place them in a new dot-com with a domain name in German. Try to get one with the most important keyword as the domain name. In not available, go for a hyphenated name like Suchwort1-Suchwort2.com
3. Link them together, preferably page to page, i.e. "This page in German". If this is too much work, just keep a link to the index-page of the other site on all pages.
Google will have no problems with this at all.
