International and Multilingual

Localised Versions and Locale-Adaptive Pages

Google needs to be able to crawl every language version at a distinct URL. Anything that serves different content at the same URL based on the visitor makes that impossible.

Locale-adaptive pages

Serving different content at one URL depending on the visitor location or Accept-Language header. Google supports it but recommends against it: Googlebot crawls predominantly from US IPs and with a generic language header, so it will usually only ever see one version.

Better approach

Separate URLs per language, hreflang between them, and a dismissible banner offering the visitor their likely preference.

Alien Road recommends: never let language selection depend on a cookie alone. Googlebot does not carry cookies between requests, so a cookie-driven site looks like a single-language site to Search regardless of how many translations you have paid for.

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