Forum Moderators: phranque
I have an e-commerce shop [snip] in German and English language (you can change the language with a language button) and have a question:
What does a robot see? Has a robot, as a browser, also an internal country code setting which shows from which country it comes from? If yes, does the shop react in the same way as it does with a browser (the browser internal country code setting is checked), i.e. shows the content in English when the customer uses a browser with English country code setting and in German when the customer uses another country code setting (my shop program standard country code setting is German)? If not, how can I force the robot to index my shop content not only in German but also in English language, if I don't want to create 2 separate shops in German and English language? Or is it possible that the robot follows the link in the language button, finds then the specific language content and indexes it?
Thanks a lot for your help.
Albert
[edited by: pageoneresults at 3:03 pm (utc) on Mar. 13, 2004]
[edit reason] Removed URI Reference - Please refer to TOS [/edit]
Welcome to Webmasterworld.
You want to look around for a search engine spider simulator. You can find one in the webmasterworld/search engine world site. You can have it spider your page and see what a search engine spider sees.
If you have a link the robot will follow it and find your second language page.
Your question raises two issues, spidering and indexing. One way to determined what is getting spidered might be to extract all visits from Googlebot and/or Slurp (for example) from your log files and evaluate what pages they actually requested. If your language seletion button uses a simple HTML link (no JS, DHTML or? ), I suspect most spiders will follow your links and find your content.
Assuming spidering is being done correctly, simply use some advanced search features on both a German and an English Google or Yahoo to determine what is actually getting indexed.
