SEO for Home Page Redirecting to Country Specific Language

[Sreeram Somayajula]

I have a International website and the home page has a temp redirection to the browser language settings. So, if some one from France visits my Home Page which is in English, it automatically redirects to France Folder Home page. Can you please let me know how can I optimize such website.

1) Are there any settings that I need to give in Google Webmaster Tools to that it recognizes my meta tags and optimizes on search results.

2) How do I do my Link Building? I have many of my links pointing towards the .com. Should I neglect my already established links and do link building for each folder independently?

3) How would Google treat such websites. Are they penalized because of my temp redirection?

[not2easy]

Hello Sreeram and welcome to the forums. A similar question came up just a few days ago, maybe you can get some quick ideas from the information shared here: [webmasterworld.com...]

[Robert Charlton]

Sreeram, though it's been a while since I've dealt with an international site, I'm thinking that your use of browser language detection and redirection is going to be conflicting with how Google prefers to understand language preferences using rel="alternate" hreflang, their method of choice... which is the topic of the thread that not2easy is pointing you to.

The hreflang attribute essentially tells Google that there are alternate language versions of a page available.

I'm assuming that your use of browser language preference and redirection would obscure these relationships for Google (and for other search engines) and would make link building efforts ineffective. Google couldn't possibly factor browser preferences into its indexing process.

Here's a Google help page (one of several), with a video that goes into the importance of consistency....

Help Google serve the correct language or regional URL
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en [support.google.com]

[phranque]

welcome to WebmasterWorld, Sreeram Somayajula!


you need to distinguish the concepts of geotargeting and language so you can address them separately.

for geotargeting purposes you should separate your content by hostname or subdirectory and specify the target region in GWT.

googlebot won't necessarily send the signals that would trigger your language detection and temporary redirection.
the safest thing for handling language specification is the link rel=alternate hreflang element as described above.

[aakk9999]

I have a International website and the home page has a temp redirection to the browser language settings.

As a user, I really really dislike this. If in SERPS I click on a result in French, I expect to be taken to French page, not to English one just because I use browser with English language settings.