Indexing the same index.php URL in different languages (based on language detection)

[ScubaAddict]

I have a page that ranks very high in all english 'googles' (google.com, google.co.uk, etc). I want to use language detection and provide a translated version on the fly. So:

* if I detect a language of spanish, I would write spanish to index.php
* If I detect a language of France, I would write french to index.php.

Will google's spanish-bot then index my page index.php for 'google.es, and french-bot index for google.fr?

I currently don't rank in foreign googles, but want to leverage the current page link-juice. Would this work?

[lucy24]

Short answer: There is no spanish-bot, french-bot and so on :( Although there are countless different national googles, it's all the same googlebot and it crawls only from the US.

I really, really hope "on the fly" doesn't mean computerized translation.

[phranque]

google doesn't have a spanish bot.
googlebot crawls for the google.es index (among other spanish language regions) but there is no language targeting available for the google country-specific indexes, only geotargeting is available.
that means if you want your content geotargeted to google.es, for example, you will need an example.es domain, or you will need to reserve a subdomain or subdirectory of an example.gTLD that can be geotargeted in GWT.

[ScubaAddict]

@lucy24 - Thank you. And no. I have many people in many countries willing to help translate my pages. Can't beat that.

phranque - thank you for the reply. I guess I will be forced to make the translations on different physical pages.