Multilingual site question

[stgma]

Hello

I am building a website which offers the same content in two different languages. In the beggining my script will determine where is the user connecting from. If he is from connecting from .fr the script will set the page to french and all links on the site will contain a lang=fr on the URL so everything on the site appears in french. Otherwise, if the user is from anywhere else, the language is set to english.

My question is, how is it possible to be able to search for my website using either french or english keywords in google ? I suppose Google will only cache the english version of my site because it is usually coming from a host such as crawl-66-249-64-79.googlebot.com.

Is there a solution ? If I prefer my site to be searchable from Google using french words, should I put a rule where if the visitor's host ends in .googlebot.com (that means the visitor is google) then it should set the content to french ? How will it be possible for the rest of the world to find my site, when they will not be entering french keywords in google ?

Regards :confused:

[mickisdaddy]

Try setting up two site maps. One english, one french. Have a link to each from your homepage. Search engines will then be able to see either no matter what language.

Or you could put a link on the homepage saying I prefer French or something of the like.

[Mel]

I am not so sure that detecting the domain name as .fr is the best way to select the choice of languages the viewer sees, as that would seem to ignore French speaking users in places like Canada, Switzerland, Belgium etc, and raises the problem with search engines not having a link to the French language pages.

IMO it would be better to set the default language to which ever you prefer, and then have your other language content in a different directory with a pair of language buttons on each page to select either French or English content as necessary, in which case Google will index all the content it finds, whether in French or English, and viewers who prefer French will be able to view your content in French regardless of where they log on from.

You may also want to use the language meta tags on your pages just to make sure, though I do not know if Google uses this in any way.

[stgma]

Thank you for your replies. I am already having a language meta tag in my web pages.

Regarding language selection, yes I do have 2 buttons where from the user can change his language. My decision about the .fr domain was such because I thought that most of the people from .fr would prefer to read it in french. That only sets the content language in the very first visit. From there on the user can change the language if he wants.

My sites do not get indexed by google fully, in fact only the index.php is getting indexed, but after some reading I did in this site, I think it's because the links in my site are in the form of index.php?page=4 etc. So google is unable to view other parts of my site. Is this the case ? I am rewriting the URL engine of my site anyway, and it will be something like index.php/page/4 from now on.

Any thought about that last issue ?

thanks a lot

[mickisdaddy]

While just having something like index.php?page=4 will not cause Google to not index a site there may be other issues.

Doing a mod_rewrite will help out though.