| rel-alternate and locale sensitive home page | Gianluca.3sp | 7/16/12 9:10 AM | Hi everyone, we have one home page for each language, fully translated (e.g. /home-it.3sp, /home-en.3sp). To serve the right content to the user we have http://domain.com/ redirected 301 to a http://domain.com/home.3sp, where home.3sp displays automatically the l |
| Re: rel-alternate and locale sensitive home page | Gianluca.3sp | 7/17/12 6:36 AM | Or better: link rel=alternate hreflang=it href=http://domain.com/home-it.3sp link rel=alternate hreflang=en href=http://domain.com/home-en.3sp Questions: 1) those annotations added to the locale-sensitive home.3sp will forward Google to the proper localized ho |
| Re: rel-alternate and locale sensitive home page | Christopher Semturs | 7/17/12 7:42 AM | the latter example looks better.Regarding your question (2): The self-reference is actually strongly recommended. |
| Re: rel-alternate and locale sensitive home page | 奥宁 | 7/17/12 11:01 PM | the second option looks a little better. Make sure that you are clear about the language. Follow up question, how are you determining what to serve the browser and bots? is it IP based or something else? Google crawls out of the US, so if you are |
| Re: rel-alternate and locale sensitive home page | Gianluca.3sp | 7/18/12 5:27 AM | Thanks Christopher, Would it be a good idea then to add the link-rel-alternate to every single page, self-referring, to tell clearly to Google the language of that page ? Home.3sp (the auto-localized one) is crawled by Google in english. Having the |
| Re: rel-alternate and locale sensitive home page | Gianluca.3sp | 7/18/12 5:48 AM | Thank you. we use the accept-language in the http header to first guess the user language and serve him a first page likely matching (with a fallback to the closest available language). If not correct she can change it manually from the site. There |
| Re: rel-alternate and locale sensitive home page | Gianluca.3sp | 7/18/12 5:54 AM | As far as we know Googlebot doesn't send accept-language, so he always see home.3sp in english (default fall-back choice). So now he thinks that's our home page, and home-en.3sp as duplicated. |
| Re: rel-alternate and locale sensitive home page | Christopher Semturs | 7/18/12 10:37 AM | The self-reference is used to resolve conflicts and considered best practice.Example: You have a page for de-AT, and you add a hreflang for 'de' to another page. Clearly you want to keep the users for de-AT on that page, hence the self-reference is n |
| Re: rel-alternate and locale sensitive home page | 奥宁 | 7/23/12 1:58 AM | oh, definitely don't want the same exact url displaying a different language each time, push them to a new url otherwise you are going to confuse not only the user, but also the bots. even in push-state you should change the url |
| Re: rel-alternate and locale sensitive home page | Gianluca.3sp | 7/23/12 5:10 AM | True. That's why I hoped that rel-alternate-hreflang could sort things out for the bot. For the user it's quite ok, as she only sees what she (likely) wants to see. But you're right, maybe is bettere to redirect from the root, though technically mor |
| Re: rel-alternate and locale sensitive home page | 奥宁 | 7/24/12 12:48 AM | keeping things standard and easy for people and the bots is always best (don't be an exception) when it comes to the technical side of things, I'd save the flair for look, feel, and UE. |
| Re: rel-alternate and locale sensitive home page | Gianluca.3sp | 7/26/12 3:34 AM | Thanks for your reply. I understand your point and quite agree, yet not always the standard and easy technical approach is also what serves the people best - this is implicit in the idea of technology development. Sometimes the technology side has to |