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We have a client who would like to present a language selection page to all first time users and I'm trying to assess what impact this might have on our efforts in getting good rankings for them.
The approach we're thinking of taking is to develop some code whereby first time visitors (i.e. visitors without a "has visited" cookie) get shown an alternative landing page where they can select the language they want.
If the language is selected and saved, the visitor would be directed to www.domain.com/index.htm or www.domain.com/language2/index.htm every time they visit, depending on which language option they chose.
Now, I'm not entirely sure if this approach is possible but if it is, does anyone have an idea of how Google would treat it?
Personally, I would prefer to treat this as more of a design challenge and avoid a language selection landing page. Surely it is better from an SEO perspective to let all users enter the site, see that it isn't the language they prefer, choose another language and at that point generate a cookie that only identifies users who have selected language 2?
Does anyone have any experience or views on this? Am I missing a more obvious solution? Any comments would be very gratefully received.
Darren
1) Not all your visitors will accept cookies, so they will have to make this language selection on each visit (annoying).
2) A growing percentage of visitors that do accept cookies also utilize software that removes cookies fairly regularly so they will have to continually make the language selection (again...annoying).
3) The ranking of your internal pages, both the default language and other language pages, will rank according to not only their content, but their individual link popularity. A good bit of any site's internal page's link popularity trickles down from the homepage. If your setup does not actually link to the internal pages from the homepage, you will be harming the amount of link popularity you are able to transfer to those pages.
4) How is this redirect going to be handled? Server side? JavaScript? Both methods have their good points and bad points, but in general, redirects should be a last resort if no better solution can be found.
5) If it were me, I would really push your people to go with a regular design and allow the visitors to select another language. A good methods tends to be a set of flags representative of the language of that set of pages at or near the top of the pages.
[edited by: Philosopher at 3:11 pm (utc) on May 1, 2008]
