How will search engines see this?

[lindajames]

Hi,

As my index file i have a index.php file that does a language detection and sends the user to the appropriate directory. For example, if someone went to mysite.com, the index.php file will do the relavant detection and redirect the visitor to mysite.com/english etc.. the index.php does this using the header location method. i.e:

header( "Location: english/" );

But what I am confused about is, how will search engines and directories see my site? do i need to add meta tags in the index.php file or what?

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Cheers
Linda

[keeper]

In general, I stay away from forced redirects and would allow the user to choose the language, then hold on to that preference in a cookie.

But if that is not an option (for whatever reason), perhaps you can explain how exactly you are "dectecting" the language of the visitor before you redirect.

[lindajames]

I dont know exactly how it does the detection but its a script that i downloaded. The script has no html headers its just php code. I did a test with the Search Engine Spider Simulator at ht*p://www.searchengineworld.com/cgi-bin/sim_spider.cgi and it seems to show the result of mydomain.com/english/ so i guess it does work.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Cheers
Linda

[keeper]

If Google has indexed the site, you can check the cache as to what exactly Googlebot saw.

If the cache looks fine, then I would leave the redirection as is. From what I've seen of the PHP header redirects, most search engines should index the final destination page.

You might want to think about finding out how the redirection works though, or at least linking to the foreign language versions.

For example you may be missing out on search engine referrals if you send all the spiders to the English version. Having foreign language pages indexed can give you some good leads ;)