bobitza
03-29-2009, 04:57 PM
Hello fellow forumists,
I'm working on a site that will be a multi-language site (for start it will have at least 2 languages).
The site will be developed with PHP/HTML.
The structure of the pages will be like index.php, about.php, etc. All the languages will have the same page layout, the difference is that the text of the pages will be stored into separate files and depending on the language selected, when called, the index.php, about.php, etc. will display different texts (with the same layout).
The language selection will be stored in a cookie, so once a user has selected the language there will be no GET or SESSION parameters passed, the users just browse the pages ... (i.e. About page will called about.php for ALL the languages; it's the variable in the cookie that will "tell" about.php what text to "load" so the users will get different results in the browser).
However, there will be links to change the language that will use GET parameters (i.e. index.php?lang=en) where index.php is in fact current php page (it's dynamically generated).
My question is: how this website structure (dynamically generated content based on a stored cookie) affects my SEO?
For example index.php can have two different text outputs depending on what cookie is stored in the user's browser. If the SE spiders will index both index.php?lang=en and index.php?lang=fr, they will still see the two different contents ... but will they do that? Should I use a permanent GET variabe passed along instead of a cookie?
What is the best SEO wise approach for developing multi language websites?
Thank you
====
Code Example:
Let's say the index.php "loads" a html template that has the following code inside:
< h1 > {TITLE1} < /h1 >
... and the title variable is dynamically replaced with texts from the selected language (i.e. {TITLE1} is replaced with 'Hello' for EN and 'Bonjour' for FR)
I'm working on a site that will be a multi-language site (for start it will have at least 2 languages).
The site will be developed with PHP/HTML.
The structure of the pages will be like index.php, about.php, etc. All the languages will have the same page layout, the difference is that the text of the pages will be stored into separate files and depending on the language selected, when called, the index.php, about.php, etc. will display different texts (with the same layout).
The language selection will be stored in a cookie, so once a user has selected the language there will be no GET or SESSION parameters passed, the users just browse the pages ... (i.e. About page will called about.php for ALL the languages; it's the variable in the cookie that will "tell" about.php what text to "load" so the users will get different results in the browser).
However, there will be links to change the language that will use GET parameters (i.e. index.php?lang=en) where index.php is in fact current php page (it's dynamically generated).
My question is: how this website structure (dynamically generated content based on a stored cookie) affects my SEO?
For example index.php can have two different text outputs depending on what cookie is stored in the user's browser. If the SE spiders will index both index.php?lang=en and index.php?lang=fr, they will still see the two different contents ... but will they do that? Should I use a permanent GET variabe passed along instead of a cookie?
What is the best SEO wise approach for developing multi language websites?
Thank you
====
Code Example:
Let's say the index.php "loads" a html template that has the following code inside:
< h1 > {TITLE1} < /h1 >
... and the title variable is dynamically replaced with texts from the selected language (i.e. {TITLE1} is replaced with 'Hello' for EN and 'Bonjour' for FR)