301 Redirecting Other language pages to English?

[Ekon]

Hello,

I have websites in europe countries which are not performing well and I need to close the website in those countries. Different language websites are on different sub-folders on the same domain such as:

http://www.example.com/es/
http://www.example.com/pt/
http://www.example.com/de/
http://www.example.com/fr/
http://www.example.com/pl/

The main site is in English which is on http://www.example.com

Now there are thousands of pages in different languages on the sub-folders (Spanish, French , German etc.)

Should I 301 redirect them to the english version site http://www.example.com , will there be any issues ?

Is there any other recommendation or 301 redirect to the main site is the best solution.

Any help will be appreciated. Thanks.

[phranque]

i would return a 410 status code for those requests and specify a language-specific custom 410 error page for each language subdirectory.

[Ekon]

You are a legend.

410 Sounds great, but is there any harm in 301 redirect.

Redirecting all the language URLs to http://www.example.com

&

Other URls such as http://www.example.com/category/es/ to http://www.example.com/category/

& same for other pages on site.

[not2easy]

Any harm? Yes, you will be creating soft 404s. A soft 404 is what Google calls it if you are showing a different page than the one people clicked on. That's because it really is a 404 "Not Found" but rather than 404, they are seeing a completely different page. If the page is no longer going to be available it is far better to show a 404 or better yet, a 410 response "Gone" rather than a completely different page.

Think of the user experience. Imagine finding a page you want to see after a search and landing on a different page in a different language.

[lucy24]

Are you talking about redirecting everyone globally to the front page, or redirecting page-for-page to the (default) English-language version of the same page? A page-for-page redirect should be OK, though you might think about the custom 410 approach if your language-specific pages have a lot of devoted fans. (It does not sound as if this is the case, alas.) Otherwise it might be counterproductive: the visitor who asked for
example.com/ua/directory/hotstuff.html
might have settled for
example.com/directory/hotstuff.html
but would not be so thrilled to hit a generic "It ain't here no more" page.

Do not repeat NOT redirect everyone to the front page. Google absolutely hates that. But if your various sub-sites were exactly parallel, as in
example.com/directory/pagename.html
example.com/es/directory/pagename.html
example.com/de/directory/pagename.html
for every possible non-English URL, that's reasonable.

This is obviously easier to do-- mechanically-- if each set of pages had the same name after the /kl/ or /iu/ two-letter part. Otherwise it becomes slightly more involved-- but that's for a different subforum. (Which one, exactly, will depend on your server.)

[Ekon]

Lucy , you are always helpful.

I am going with page for page 301 redirect to the default English language of the site , because the other sub directory pages has 50-60 root domains links to them.

410 approach will lose all the link juice.