Indexing i18n pages

[Marcin Okraszewski <ok...@o2.pl>]

Hi,
I'm building a multi language web site. The language is chosen from 
browser settings. I'm afraid that using this approach, the indexing 
engines will index only English version of my page. It might prevent 
people speaking my native language from finding my pages.

Is there any way to prevent this? I could make selecting language by 
setting the "locale" cookie, but I don't think robots will rescan all 
pages. Maybe I should check it is a robot and serve it a page with 
contents in all languages - but how to do it with i18n ?

Regards,
Marcin Okraszewski

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Re: Indexing i18n pages

[Mark Lundquist <ml...@wrinkledog.com>]

On Mar 28, 2004, at 2:54 AM, Marcin Okraszewski wrote:

> Hi,
> I'm building a multi language web site. The language is chosen from 
> browser settings. I'm afraid that using this approach, the indexing 
> engines will index only English version of my page. It might prevent 
> people speaking my native language from finding my pages.
>
> Is there any way to prevent this? I could make selecting language by 
> setting the "locale" cookie, but I don't think robots will rescan all 
> pages. Maybe I should check it is a robot and serve it a page with 
> contents in all languages

I doubt if that's really what you'd want...

I'd approach it like this:

1) Make sure that there are URI spaces for non-negotiated content in 
all the languages, e.g.

	your.dom.ain/fr_FR/...
	your.dom.ain/de_DE/...

i.e., "your.dom.ain/About-Us" would serve content for the negotiated 
language, but "your.dom.ain/fr_FR/About-Us" would always be French.

2) Provide a page containing links to all of the above "language root" 
URIs.

3) Make that page reachable from the home page.

There, now the index bots will spider your site in all languages.
~ml