Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    4. Best practice to redirects based on visitors' detected language

    Moz Q&A is closed.

    After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

    Best practice to redirects based on visitors' detected language

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    5
    9
    26295
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • Damiano
      Damiano last edited by

      One of our websites has two languages, English and Italian.

      The English pages are available at the root level:
      www.site.com/   English homepage www.site.com/page1
      www.site.com/page2

      The Italian pages are available under the /it/ level:
      www.site.com/it   Italian homepage www.site.com/it/pagina1
      www.site.com/it/pagina2

      When an Italian visitor first visits www.mysit.com we'd like to redirect it to www.site.com/it but we don't know if that would impact search engine spiders (eg GoogleBot) in any way...

      It would be better to do a Javascript redirect? Or an http 3xx redirect? If so, which of the 3xx redirect should we use?

      Thank you

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • Damiano
        Damiano @CoolSEOnStuff last edited by

        We've adopted the following solution:

        we show the English homepage, but we determine the user's preferred language (from the Accept-Language header sent by the browser). If our site supports that language, we show a temporary balloon that highlights the related link to go to the localized homepage.

        Thank you all for your hints and notes.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • CoolSEOnStuff
          CoolSEOnStuff last edited by

          I would stay away from javascript redirects as it can be considered cloaking. Best thing to do is have a page for new visitors (those not having your cookie) and send them to a page that allows them to choose what language they want. You can then set a cookie so when they return it will automatically direct them to the right site.

          By not doing any sneaky javascript redirects or IP redirects, you allow google the ability to crawl all the pages of your site and improve indexing, trust, etc etc... Also, I would go into Google webmaster tools and specify the country your /it pages are directed to. This will help in international search and trust from Google.

          Damiano 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • Damiano
            Damiano @vheilman last edited by

            I've done a test with a simple ASP page with a Response.Redirect: <% Response.Redirect "test.htm" %>

            This is what Fiddler has catched: HTTP/1.1 302 Object moved Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.1 Date: Thu, 05 May 2011 06:44:10 GMT X-Powered-By: ASP.NET Location: test.htm Content-Length: 121 Content-Type: text/html Cache-control: private <title>Object moved</title>

            Object Moved

            This object may be found <a href="">here</a>.

            I don't think that 302 would be the best solution. As specified in the HTTP specs ( http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html ) wouldn't we prefer a 307 Temporary Redirect?

            Thank you

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • vheilman
              vheilman last edited by

              You also asked about which 30x redirect to use. I'm also looking for this answer. We currently an ASP header redirect. I don't think this is best, but I'm not sure a 301 redirect can be used. I'd like to hear from others too.

              This is what we have now:

              lang = Request.ServerVariables("HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE")
              real_lang = Left(lang,2)
              'Response.Write real_lang
              Select case real_lang
                  case "en" 
                      Response.Redirect "/en"
                  case "fr"
                      Response.Redirect "/fr"
                  case "de"
                      Response.Redirect "/ge"
                  case else
                      Response.Redirect "/en"

              End Select

              Damiano 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • vheilman
                vheilman @A_Q last edited by

                They automatically redirect people in the uk who type in www.google.com to www.google.co.uk

                But, this is different from changing language on a visitor. I'm not sure what google would do if I was in Italy and used my american laptop to visit google.com. I don't think they'd switch me to www.google.it, but maybe someone else has this answer.

                Using the browser language settings has worked well for us.

                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                • A_Q
                  A_Q last edited by

                  You might want to look into what Google do themselves.

                  They automatically redirect people in the uk who type in www.google.com to www.google.co.uk

                  If it's good enough for google it's good enough for us. Just make sure you do not look like you are cloaking.

                  You need to give users the ability to change language when they are on the website though. As Vince mentioned just because a user is visiting the website from Italy it does not mean that they are Italian.

                  vheilman 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                  • vheilman
                    vheilman last edited by

                    Hi Daminao,

                    I do a redirect based on browser language.  I'd stay away from IP/location based redirects. You can have English vistors in Italian locations that would be lost on your pages.

                    hth,

                    Vince

                    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                    • wissamdandan
                      wissamdandan last edited by

                      Hi Damiano,

                      Matt explained very good in this video and basically he answers all your question.

                      If you have additional Q. please let me know

                      watch?v=7paVYBgH0Hw

                      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                      • 1 / 1
                      • First post
                        Last post

                      Got a burning SEO question?

                      Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                      Start my free trial


                      Browse Questions

                      Explore more categories

                      • Moz Tools

                        Chat with the community about the Moz tools.

                      • SEO Tactics

                        Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers

                      • Community

                        Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!

                      • Digital Marketing

                        Chat about tactics outside of SEO

                      • Research & Trends

                        Dive into research and trends in the search industry.

                      • Support

                        Connect on product support and feature requests.

                      • See all categories

                      Related Questions

                      • kirin44355

                        Mass URL changes and redirecting those old URLS to the new. What is SEO Risk and best practices?

                        Hello good people of the MOZ community, I am looking to do a mass edit of URLS on content pages within our sites. The way these were initially setup was to be unique by having the date in the URL which was a few years ago and can make evergreen content now seem dated. The new URLS would follow a better folder path style naming convention and would be way better URLS overall. Some examples of the **old **URLS would be https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Skates/buying-guide-9-17-2012,default,pg.html
                        https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Kids-Inline-Skates/buying-guide-11-13-2012,default,pg.html
                        https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Hockey-Skates/buying-guide-9-3-2012,default,pg.html
                        https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Aggressive-Skates/buying-guide-7-19-2012,default,pg.html The new URLS would look like this which would be a great improvement https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Skates,default,pg.html
                        https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Kids-Inline-Skates,default,pg.html
                        https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Hockey-Skates,default,pg.html
                        https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Aggressive-Skates,default,pg.html My worry is that we do rank fairly well organically for some of the content and don't want to anger the google machine. The way I would be doing the process would be to edit the URLS to the new layout, then do the redirect for them and push live. Is there a great SEO risk to doing this? 
                        Is there a way to do a mass "Fetch as googlebot" to reindex these if I do say 50 a day? I only see the ability to do 1 URL at a time in the webmaster backend. 
                        Is there anything else I am missing? I believe this change would overall be good in the long run but do not want to take a huge hit initially by doing something incorrectly. This would be done on 5- to a couple hundred links across various sites I manage. Thanks in advance,
                        Chris Gorski

                        Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kirin44355
                        0
                      • teddef

                        Best practice for deindexing large quantities of pages

                        We are trying to deindex a large quantity of pages on our site and want to know what the best practice for doing that is. For reference, the reason we are looking for methods that could help us speed it up is we have about 500,000 URLs that we want deindexed because of mis-formatted HTML code and google indexed them much faster than it is taking to unindex them unfortunately. We don't want to risk clogging up our limited crawl log/budget by submitting a sitemap of URLs that have "noindex" on them as a hack for deindexing. Although theoretically that should work, we are looking for white hat methods that are faster than "being patient and waiting it out", since that would likely take months if not years with Google's current crawl rate of our site.

                        Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | teddef
                        0
                      • SEOhmygod

                        Does content revealed by a 'show more' button get crawled by Google?

                        I have a div on my website with around 500 words of unique content in, automatically when the page is first visited the div has a fixed height of 100px, showing a couple of hundred words and fading out to white, with a show more button, which when clicked, increases the height to show the full content. My question is, does Google crawl the content in that div when it renders the page? Or disregard it? Its all in the source code. Or worse, do they consider this cloaking or hidden content? It is only there to make the site more useable for customers, so i don't want to get penalised for it. Cheers

                        Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOhmygod
                        0
                      • VeteransFirstMarketing

                        SEO impact of 301 redirects based on IP addresses from a specific state

                        Hello Moz Community! We are facing an issue that may or may not be unique, but need some advice and/or clarification on the best way to address the issue. We recently rebranded and launched a new site under a new domain and things have been progressing well.  However, despite all the up front legwork on trademarks and licensing, we have recently encountered a hiccup that forces us to revert to the old URL/branding for one specific state.  This may be a temporary issue that lasts a couple of months or it could potentially be in the court system for a couple of years. One potential solution we have discussed is to redirect the new site to the old site based on IP addresses for the state in question.  Looking for any guidance on what type of impact this may have on SEO.  Also open to any other suggestions or guidance on dealing with this situation. Thanks

                        Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VeteransFirstMarketing
                        0
                      • BrandBuilder

                        New Site (redesign) Launched Without 301 Redirects to New Pages - Too Late to Add Redirects?

                        We recently launched a redesign/redevelopment of a site but failed to put 301 redirects in place for the old URL's. It's been about 2 months. Is it too late to even bother worrying about it at this point? The site has seen a notable decrease in site traffic/visits, perhaps due to this issue. I assume that once the search engines get an error on a URL, it will remove it from displaying in search results after a period of time. I'm just not sure if they will try to re-crawl those old URLs at some point and if so, it may be worth it to have those 301 redirects in place. Thank you.

                        Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BrandBuilder
                        0
                      • kevinliao

                        What happens to a domain in SERPs when it's set to redirect to another?

                        We have just acquired a competing website and are wondering whether to leave it running as is for now, or set the domain to redirect to our own site. If we set up this redirect, what would happen to the old site in Google SERPs? Would the site drop off from results? If so, would we capture this new search traffic or is it a free for all and all sites compete for the search traffic as normal? Thanks in advance. Paul

                        Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kevinliao
                        0
                      • friendoffood

                        Do 404s really 'lose' link juice?

                        It doesn't make sense to me that a 404 causes a loss in link juice, although that is what I've read.  What if you have a page that is legitimate -- think of a merchant oriented page where you sell an item for a given merchant --, and then the merchant closes his doors.  It makes little sense 5 years later to still have their merchant page so why would removing them from your site in any way hurt your site?  I could redirect forever but that makes little sense.  What makes sense to me is keeping the page for a while with an explanation and options for 'similar' products, and then eventually putting in a 404.  I would think the eventual dropping out of the index actually REDUCES the overall link juice (ie less pages), so there is no harm in using a 404 in this way.  It also is a way to avoid the site just getting bigger and bigger and having more and more 'bad' user experiences over time. Am I looking at it wrong? ps I've included this in 'link building' because it is related in a sense -- link 'paring'.

                        Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | friendoffood
                        0
                      • kchandler

                        What Happens If a Hreflang Sitemap Doesn't Include Every Language for Missing Translated Pages?

                        As we are building a hreflang sitemap for a client, we are correctly implementing the tag across 5 different languages including English. However, the News and Events section was never translated into any of the other four languages. There are also a few pages that were translated into some but not all of the 4 languages. Is it good practice to still list out the individual non-translated pages like on a regular sitemap without a hreflang tag? Should the hreflang sitemap include the hreflang tag with pages that are missing a few language translations (when one or two language translations may be missing)? We are uncertain if this inconsistency would create a problem and we would like some feedback before pushing the hreflang sitemap live.

                        Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kchandler
                        0

                      Get started with Moz Pro!

                      Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                      Start my free trial
                      Products
                      • Moz Pro
                      • Moz Local
                      • Moz API
                      • Moz Data
                      • STAT
                      • Product Updates
                      Moz Solutions
                      • SMB Solutions
                      • Agency Solutions
                      • Enterprise Solutions
                      Free SEO Tools
                      • Domain Authority Checker
                      • Link Explorer
                      • Keyword Explorer
                      • Competitive Research
                      • Brand Authority Checker
                      • Local Citation Checker
                      • MozBar Extension
                      • MozCast
                      Resources
                      • Blog
                      • SEO Learning Center
                      • Help Hub
                      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                      • How-to Guides
                      • Moz Academy
                      • API Docs
                      About Moz
                      • About
                      • Team
                      • Careers
                      • Contact
                      Why Moz
                      • Case Studies
                      • Testimonials
                      Get Involved
                      • Become an Affiliate
                      • MozCon
                      • Webinars
                      • Practical Marketer Series
                      • MozPod
                      Connect with us

                      Contact the Help team

                      Join our newsletter
                      Moz logo
                      © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                      • Accessibility
                      • Terms of Use
                      • Privacy

                      Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.