sessions and search engines

language selection scenario

[nwilson]

Hi everyone.

I have to write a site in both English and Danish and was going to use sessions for the selection untill I thought about the SE's possible handling of this. Here is the scenario:

user enters site and gets default english text.

there is a link for the danish version which, when pressed resets the $lang session var to 'dk'

every page looks for the $lang var and displays text accordingly.

Now, the problem is that www.mysite/mypage.php could show either english or danish
so I think this may well confuse the engines.

I'd appreciate any comments, ideas or suggestions :)

Nick

[Brett_Tabke]

It's very difficult to keep the se's straight on it. Google and Ink are the only two indexing dynamic content on a regular basis. Best bet is to cloak for them and feed only one of the two pages as default without the session tracking url.

[nwilson]

Thanks Brett,
I don't think that will work though as there is no session tracking url on pages after the initial 'click'

kinda like this:

click 'danish lang link'
leads to : www.somesite/index.php?lang=dk

then every subsequent click with be just normal urls but with danish content.

I think the best idea is a .dk domain or [dk.mysite.com...]
type thingy...

Cheers

Nick

[william_dw]

You could use mod_rewrite to create something like mysite.com/content/index.html/english or similar (mod_rewrite isnt my thing), which would keep both spiders & bookmarks happy as oppose to session variables.

If you're using PHP and feel like using a errordocument, you could do that but remember to send a 200 OK header via PHP to override the 404 default status header.

HTH,
Dw