At a recent international search marketing conference in London the most frequent question asked by the audience was “How do I get my content found and indexed by global and local search engines?”
During the breaks I talked to a few people who indicated little or none of their local market content was being indexed by the major engines. Close examination of these sites revealed that they were all using some form of language detection. In two cases they were doing language detection because they saw Google doing it and assumed that this was the best approach.
However, if you are like me and travel a lot to other countries, you know that assumption can lead to a big problem: Just because I am physically located in a particular country doesn’t necessarily mean that its native language is the content I wish to see. There are other factors that come into play, such as my browser default language, the language I use for queries and so on.
Lets take a deeper look at dynamic language and location detection and explore some of the things you should do to make the process work better.
What is your default dynamic language response?
Browser level language detection is the most popular method of determining a language preference. Your web server simply looks at the visitor’s language preference submitted to the server via “accept-language header” and then locates and serves any content that contains that language code. For example, a person who downloads the French-language version of Firefox will typically have their default language preference set to “French” or “French_France.” When they visit your site the server will read the preference and automatically redirect the visitor to the French version of the site.
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