Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Well yes, I know, I wouldn't have done it myself this way for many more reasons, but that's how I acquired the site and now I'm going through fixing and optimizing things. Amazingly is, that my tiny optimizations had already a huge impact on visitor stream, especially with users noticing them Alone bringing the Pagespeed from like 60% to >90% did increase user activity as also search results already by a 20-30% and revenue by 50% in less than 2 weeks! I can only suggest anyone to make a site speedy! Anyway... back to topic!

Well, in the case I would not have a page under /, I would of course had choicen either /de/ or /en/ to redirect to with 301 or 302, when visitors would have reached the home page.

But the more I think about it and after the thoughts I had previously on my post to Jane (which hers was also a great help, same as yours!) I think the best results might be really achieved by keeping the homepage as it is.
Just not sure yet, if I should add to the home page a x-default hreflang attribute or maybe none at all? Or maybe one for each language?

I thought even about doing a small test maybe first with other pages under the domain and protocol the results, before going after the home page, which is the one bringing in nearly all traffic.

Well, things seem now a lot more clear of what to do and what to avoid and I believe I can figure out a way now to make it work

Thanks everyone!

If the page isn't indexed, then neither a hreflang or canonical URL makes any sense, as search engines would ignore that page alltogether.

I think, Matt Cutts emphases "...if you’re doing a_lot_of guest blogging then you’re hanging out with really bad company" and not really saying, that guest blogging in itself is bad alltogether.

With "really bad company" he probably means the link neighbourhood, which I can see that this would be the case, by probably creating similar link profiles with spammers, when overdoing it with guest blogging.

And yes I agree with what was said, while you are at it already, doing all the effort for guest blogging, why not do it for targeting good audiences on useful blogs and not just search engines.

What isn't fully clear yet: If I move the german version under /de/ and signalize the / is english and not for german audiences anymore, as now /de/ is for them, would /de/ rank like they would be new sites without pagerank (and probable /de/ as also / lose their ranks in german search) or would they acquire similar pagerank like /, since it's just another version pointed to? I have to add, in this very specific case many keywords are the same in both languages.

While reading an article here, another thought came. What if I kept the site on / by doing one of this:

1. Either signalize to Google, it's for international audiences (which I guess would be no different than now) with the default attribute and refer to no language-specific versions for Google. Users would receive a message on the site to get to a german version, but for which Google would have no reference there's another URL for / having the content in this language.

2. Or add hreflang tags for english as also the german language for the URL at / - so Google would think this site is suitable for both audiences and as a result might keep it unmodified in the US and german search as it is now. I guess it's possible to assign more than one language to one URL?

This would be only for the homepage, all other pages would receive separate URLs. Would that be a solution to keep Google from de-ranking accidentally the homepage from the german search? Or I'm doing a mistake in my thinking here?

Well, the german one is more important and ranks for 70% of the traffic. So this is the important one to keep. However, it's not the german version that Google ranks so well in the german search, but the english version as this is the version it has indexed.

So, which do I keep in this case for Google as the default language?

Would that cause maybe Google to drop large parts of the 70% traffic if suddenly it sees completely different content (remember it's the english it sees) or would it recognize it's the same it knew, just in another language when using the hreflang and would just display the german language now in the german results without mainly affecting the rank?

The site ranks extremely well on many important Top 1-5 keywords, so it's really critical to keep that....

Hi Kevin!

The problem isn't how to realize the technical details. I know those in the best detail as I'm a longtime webdeveloper.

The question is really around, which language to keep where or to move maybe both to separate URLs. Right now no language has an unique URL, they share the same.

Google indexes the english language, however the site ranks best in the german Google search. So here is the real dilemma: if I switch to the german as default, even though that's 70% of the visitors, I'm completely changing what Google sees. If I keep english, I wonder, if that will be worse to make the site rank better in google.com, since it's seen more relevant for the german search despite english indexed content.

Or do I move every site on it's own URL, even the frontpage like http://feldzug.net/de and http://feldzug.net/en  and no page under http://feldzug.net directly (would redirect). But stil the question remains, with the special situation described above, which would be the default redirect, or would it not matter in this case?

Hello!

My site currently serves content in german and english, however without having separate URLs (it depends on Accept-Language and has a submitform for changing language based on set cookies).

The site appears extremely well in the search engine, with many keywords ranking at #1-10. They appear on the german and english google search, with the first one bringing the best results. It's however the english site that appears in the results.

I want to change to a better approach by having subdirectories for each language, as I'm extending the site, I know how to do this but I have found -nowhere- any infos on how to preserve my search engine ranks? If I keep the english version as homepage and send german visitors to /de/, might this kill my position in the german search engine which is very important, as the new frontpage under /de/ would become more relevant and the english one maybe less?

Or should I keep the german version the default one and send english visitors elsewhere? What happens with my search positions, if I have no side on the / but visitors are always send to either /en/ or /de/?

Every help is greatly appreciated, as I found a lot of articles everywhere on how to make a multilingual site, but nowhere anything on how it affects current search results.

Well yes, I know, I wouldn't have done it myself this way for many more reasons, but that's how I acquired the site and now I'm going through fixing and optimizing things. Amazingly is, that my tiny optimizations had already a huge impact on visitor stream, especially with users noticing them Alone bringing the Pagespeed from like 60% to >90% did increase user activity as also search results already by a 20-30% and revenue by 50% in less than 2 weeks! I can only suggest anyone to make a site speedy! Anyway... back to topic!

Well, in the case I would not have a page under /, I would of course had choicen either /de/ or /en/ to redirect to with 301 or 302, when visitors would have reached the home page.

But the more I think about it and after the thoughts I had previously on my post to Jane (which hers was also a great help, same as yours!) I think the best results might be really achieved by keeping the homepage as it is.
Just not sure yet, if I should add to the home page a x-default hreflang attribute or maybe none at all? Or maybe one for each language?

I thought even about doing a small test maybe first with other pages under the domain and protocol the results, before going after the home page, which is the one bringing in nearly all traffic.

Well, things seem now a lot more clear of what to do and what to avoid and I believe I can figure out a way now to make it work

Thanks everyone!