> Avoid automatically redirecting users from one language version of a site to a different language version of a site. For example, don't redirect based on what you think the user's language may be. These redirections could prevent users (and search engines) from viewing all the versions of your site.
We also observed a few interesting things:
* The language selector page has an extremely low bounce rate. I think the <1% bounce rate is almost entirely low-end bots, or clients that immediately lose connection.
* Web search results link directly to the localized pages (e.g. /en/) so majority of our traffic never lands on the language selector page.
All in all, it doesn't suck enough to take resources from other more pressing issues. However, would love to hear how you would build it differently!
We experimented with several approaches to this over the years and this one sucked the least. Our constraints are:
1) Keep things simple and easy to test and maintain.
2) Follow search engine recommendations (below) as much as we can.
3) Only 30% of our visitors select the English language. We have a very multilingual user base.
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/specialty/internat...
> Avoid automatically redirecting users from one language version of a site to a different language version of a site. For example, don't redirect based on what you think the user's language may be. These redirections could prevent users (and search engines) from viewing all the versions of your site.
We also observed a few interesting things:
* The language selector page has an extremely low bounce rate. I think the <1% bounce rate is almost entirely low-end bots, or clients that immediately lose connection.
* Web search results link directly to the localized pages (e.g. /en/) so majority of our traffic never lands on the language selector page.
All in all, it doesn't suck enough to take resources from other more pressing issues. However, would love to hear how you would build it differently!