Search engine spidering and languages question

[tomasv]

I have a question regarding search engines and multi language sites.

I run a site that has only been available in swedish thus the search engines have only spidered the swedish content. Now we are about to release it in English and Spanish and english will be the default language if no webbrowser settings can be detected. You will be able to change your language via a listbox.

My question is, will search engines stop spidering the other languages then english or does google for example spider using different language settings? Does anyone have any suggestions on how to solve this problem since losing my rank on the swedish site would be a catastrophy.

Thanks in advance!

[sunzon]

There is no reason for SE's to stop spidering or rerank your original pages, after all your new language versions are different (=new pages). They in turn will get indexed.
Your drop down box is maybe best for visitors, but to ensure your other languages pages get indexed it would be good to have a link on your original page(s) to these other languages (eg a small flag with alt txt and link), that the robot can follow so they get indexed. You benefit better from robot visits checking up on your actual listing, to get the new pages indexed.

I'm not sure a robot would pick up links from the option list of a dropdown box, any experience anyone?

[pageoneresults]

Hello tomasv, Welcome to WebmasterWorld!

I run a site that has only been available in swedish thus the search engines have only spidered the swedish content. Now we are about to release it in English and Spanish and english will be the default language if no webbrowser settings can be detected. You will be able to change your language via a listbox.

Have you thought about buying the .com, .ar, .es, and .mx versions of the domain to house the translated versions? And then, have you thought about hosting those in their respective countries?

[tomasv]

Hiya and thanks for the relpys.
Our idea is to have one domain name regardless of language since we want people from different countires to interact with eachother. Right now the user picks the language or the language gets autodetected and then its totaly transparent as in no different URL for different languages. But from what I understand that is not the best way to do it if you want search engines to spider all languages. Maybe links that will get you to different languages will solve the problem or some kind of mod_rewrite that modifies the URL.

[chrisgarrett]

I think safest bet would be to have footer navigation with links to the different language versions and not require cookies to see pages in different languages. It will probably help if in the markup it correctly identifies the language rather than just simply outputting utf-8 also.